Recommendations for servers running SATA drives [hot-swap]

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 05:25:32PM +0200, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> It was about year ago with Asus and Sun Fire X2100. I don't have Asus  
> servers now (all returned as reclamation). Now I am running one X2100  
> and about ten X2100 M2. I have one spare X2100 M2, so if somebody have  
> exact order of commands used to "hot-swap" the disk, I can test it in  
> few days.

I believe the correct order of operation is to do a "detach" on the
channel before physically removing the disk, insert the new disk, then
do "attach" on the same channel.  "list" should be done afterwards to
ensure the new disk shows up.

If you want me to verify for certain, I have a test box built in the
other room which has a SATA hot-swap backplane on it.

I've also seen cases where the "attach" works, but upon doing "list",
the old disk ID/string is still shown.  In this case I had to do a
"detach", remove the disk, insert the new disk, "reinit", then an
"attach" for things to work.

Finally, I've also seen the kernel panic or hard-lock after running
"reinit", but this may have had something to do with Intel MatrixRAID.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |