On Mon, 13 Oct 1997, Tom Yates wrote:
well, that was an interesting weekend.
The sushi was excellent and the champagne at 4:30 am was, um, different.
we've been told that the correct way to get a 9Gb and a 4Gb hot spare is to allow the newfs to allocate a 9Gb hot spare, and then RAID SWAP in a 4Gb into a slot left unoccupied in shelf 0. when we try the RAID SWAP, the bus fails to reset properly, and the damn thing goes into a variety of raid panic situations. all discs in the shelf on slot 0 are also showing amber "failure" lights, although they appear to work fine. lengthy calls to netapp fail to rectify this problem, and it's getting to the point where the restore won't finish until after 0001 monday, which is getting closer to the promised 0700 "everything back" time than i'd like, so i decided to go with a system which seems to handle the hot spare disc correctly - in the event of a disc failure, it RAID reconstructs to the 9Gb hot spare - but can't do hot swap. it's no worse than my old 450s, though i hope netapp will be able to rectify this later in the week, as does tony. the precise positioning of the thin gray ribbon cable that used to go to the narrow SCSI card in slot 9 seems to be an important unknown, since i understand this cable is responsible for carrying raid swap information around.
Other than the amber lights on shelf 0 and the questionable thin ribbon cable between scsi cards and the lost ability to do hot swapping under this mixed disk configuration, one other question comes to mind:
If a 4GB disk fails and is reconstructed on the 9GB hot spare, then is cold swapped with a new 4GB disk, can we fail out the 9GB disk to reconstruct the new 4GB disk?
t'other tired admin...
-Caroline