HP: SCSI Reset/lbolt deciphering

Title:

HP: SCSI Reset/lbolt deciphering

Author:

Douglas O’Leary <dkoleary@olearycomputers.com>

Description:

HP: SCSI Reset/lbolt deciphering

Date created:

06/2008

Date updated:

07/2009

Disclaimer:

Standard: Use the information that follows at your own risk. If you screw up a system, don’t blame it on me…

Here’s the scenario: you have a new set of disks, you try to create a volume group out of them; however, the vgcreate/vgextend command hangs. You try to kill it (after waiting about 15 minutes); however, that doesn’t work. You then run an ioscan -fC disk to force a scsi reset & that hangs.

Finally, you look in the syslog only to find that whole slew of messages that indicate that bad things are happening with your scsi bus. Calling HP will usually have them asking you to identify the device that’s causing problems. How to do that is the point of this ll entry.

To ID the device, it’s probably easiest to grep out the appropriate error message from the syslog. What you’re looking for is as follows:

grep -i "abort tag" /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log

On the line that says lbolt, you’ll see a phrase that looks like:

dev: bc078000

The breakout of the bc0780000 is as follows:

bc:	Two cahracters; ignore
07:	Bus
8	SCSI Target ID
0:	LUN
00	Flags; ignore

So, dev: bc078000 turns out to be c7t8d0. That’s not too tough!