Re: [Evms-cluster] [Evms-devel] Severe EVMS Volume problems

[Kevin C. <kev...@us...>]

Hi Bjoern,

On Thu July 6 2006 2:16 pm, bm...@tu... wrote:
> > What happened after you upgraded the firmware?
>
> We rebooted the ISCSI-device, while it was still mounted on node1. After
> the firmware update on the Areca-Controller in the OPEN-E ISCSI-device we
> rebooted node1. Afterwards, evms did not start, because the underlying
> device /dev/sdb1 was missing.

The fact that the partition table disappeared after the firmware update is a 
little troubling. If the firware update somehow overwrote or modified the 
partition table, how do we know that it didn't also modify or overwrite other 
areas of the disk?

> > Did the size of sdb change after the firmware upgrade?
>
> Nope, parted show exactly the same size..

Do you know if the segments were from the DOS plugin or the GPT plugin before 
the firmware update? Based on your log file, they are currently GPT.

> > What prompted you to write a new partition table to the disk?
>
> We thought it just might have lost its partition table. Since EVMS did not
> use the whole disk, we did not think it would break anything.
>
> > It looks like you've got one GPT segment on the sdb disk now. Does it
> > show up in EVMS as a compatibility volume?
>
> Nope, nothing show up, only /dev/sdb1 as a raw device, we would have to
> convert it first to use.

What do you mean by "raw device"?

Does /dev/evms/sdb1 show up in the "logical volumes" panel in evmsgui or 
evmsn? Based on your log, it looks like it should.

> > Have you done anything with that segment/volume since you wrote the new
> > partition table?
>
> Nope, besides a readonly xfs_repair -n /dev/sdb1 try, which did not find
> the primary superblock, went through the whole disk and could not recover
> the primary block from the secondaries (perhaps this does not work with
> -n).
>
> > Is sdb the only disk in the cluster container?
>
> sdb1, yes
>
> > What kind of objects and volumes had you created in the cluster
> > container? LVM? RAID?
>
> one big volume

Please send me (privately) an image of the start of the sdb1 partition and I 
can look at it to see if it contains any EVMS segment/container/volume 
metadata or any filesystem metadata. Run:
dd if=/dev/evms/.nodes/sdb1 of=/tmp/sdb1.img bs=1k count=1024
and mail me the /tmp/sdb1.img file.

Also send me the output of:
blockdev --report /dev/evms/.nodes/sdb1
blockdev --report /dev/evms/.nodes/sdb

-- 
Kevin Corry
kev...@us...
http://www.ibm.com/linux/
http://evms.sourceforge.net/