i've got an F330 that i'd like to get online one of these days, and i'd like to get the most storage onto it that i possibly can. it's got 5 narrow SCSI channels on it, and i have a whole slew of DEC BA350 StorageWorks shelves to hook up to it. what is the largest size drives i can put on this thing? is there a particular model of drive that i am limited to? also, what are my options for a wide scsi controller or two in this thing? several of the BA350 shelves have 16-bit personality cards in them, and i'd love to be able to take advantage of that rather than downgrade them to 8-bit personality cards.
i think that's all the questions i have for now.
next step after getting disks on it, find a copy of the OS for it.
-brian
Howdy.
Anyone running Seagate ST15150N's in their F330? Better yet, any NetApp hardware dudes listening in that might have some notes pertaining to those particular drives?
I need to know the correct jumper settings. The StorageWorks SBB's I'm using don't have the right internal cabling -- unlike every other blasted Seagate drive I've ever seen, the 15150N's do _not_ have an address jumper block and remote LED pins on the front or side of the drive - everything's on the back. No problem, I just set the ID's by hand. The question is whether or not to set the parity (assuming "enabled" is correct) and the proper termination option. The other issue is "motor start enabled" vs. "delay start"; right now I have the motor enable set, and the filer says "Spinning up drives: 9a.0 9a.1 ..." (etc.) but then whines that "startup failed". Hmmm. Most of the "scsi_*" commands play stupid (error messages like "invalid ha: 9", or "disk zero status -1").
These drives came off an old Auspex :-) and I did successfully (I think) get their firmware updated. When I first tried to lay down a volume, though, the filer barfed and rebooted. After that nothing I've tried has been successful. Right now I've pulled the drives off the filer and am reformatting and relabeling them on an old Solaris box. It doesn't seem to be having any problems with 'em, so I figure if I can confirm the proper jumper settings and then plug 'em back into the filer, it'll see that they need to be zero'ed and relabeled and everything will be peachy.
Right?
Any assistance greatly appreciated,
-- Chris
-- Chris Lamb, Unix Guy MeasureCast, Inc. 503-241-1469 x247 skeezics@measurecast.com
Following up to my own post...
It seems that things are working now, at least for three of the seven drives. Sure, nobody in the history of mankind will ever likely recreate this dubious feat, but for posterity:
1. Pulled seven ST15150N drives from the Auspex carriers and mounted 'em in the StorageWorks SBB's.
2. Removed all jumpers. Set SCSI ID jumpers by hand. (With a trip to Radio Snack and a soldering iron, I could probably have hacked up a set of jumpers so that I'd have auto-ID selection and the Pretty Blinky Lights, but for now I'll leave that as a future enhancement opportunity.)
3. Attached the shelf to the filer. It recognized all seven drives and informed me they needed new firmware. Updated the firmware successfully with "disk_fw_update".
4. Attempted to "vol create test -d <etc>" at which point the filer (5.3.7R3) promptly blew chunks. Upon reboot, the machine displayed all sorts of unpleasant and unfamiliar messages, at which point I was fearing that perhaps the firmware update had not in fact been successful and I was in for a long night of ripping open the SBBs and mounting another seven victims. Er, drives.
5. Instead, attached the shelf to my trusty old 4/670MP, which also whined about 'em not being recognized. But after tracking down a reasonable-looking format.dat entry, I successfully formatted and verified three of the seven drives. At around 1 hour and 45 minutes _per drive_, during which time I ran out of beer and patience, I shut everything down and stuck the shelf back on the filer.
6. All three freshly and painstakingly reformatted drives showed up. Created a test volume. Success! Boot blocks updated! Yee haw, they work! Now, to repeat step 5 for the other four drives, after a beer run to restock.
Hee hee, and at 1:00, disk scrubbing kicked in. Neat. Everything looks just peachy so far...
So, after poking around with little or no success with some of the dangerous commands (and bouncing the box a couple of times :-) I'm still curious if there was a better/easier/faster way to have the filer force a reformat directly, but at this point i'm just going to bang on the drives for a while, do some reboots, see how they hold up. Then I'll fix up the four drives and boost my filer up to juuust about twice the capacity of my son's iBook! Hee hee. But my rack and UPS have arrived, so once the rest of the 15150's are formatted up, I'll actually put the filer into "production" as the boondoggle.com NFS server. Are there enough of us out there yet to start the "toasters-at-home" mailing list? :-)
And now that I've swiped the drives from that old Auspex, anyone want to roll it out back for some target practice? :-)
-- Chris
(Oh, and if you're wondering WHY I have an Auspex in my basement, the answer is "Because it was there." I'm a dedicated NetApp fan, but hey, free stuff is free stuff. :-) That thing is one massive, ugly hunk of metal compared to my sweet little '330.)
-- Chris Lamb, Unix Guy MeasureCast, Inc. 503-241-1469 x247 skeezics@measurecast.com
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Brian Hechinger -
Chris Lamb