[CLUE-Tech] RedHat Kickstart, with Oracle and EMC.

[Jim Ockers]

Jeffrey,

Jeffrey Brown wrote:
> 
> Jim, What distribution/version of Linux are you using? I've tried and
> failed to hook-up a QLogic 2200 fibre-channel card to our fabric using
> RedHat 7.3 & RedHat 8.0. QLogic says that's it's a problem w/ our SCSI
> mid-layer, their driver works fine, and RedHat says those drivers are
> only supported with Advanced Server 2.1 or RedHat Enterprise Linux. Also
> what type of fibre channel cards are you using your Linux boxes?

We are using the QLA2200 under Red Hat 7.2.  There is a problem with 
general Linux SAN support in that the SAN volume MUST show up at LUN0
on the SCSI interface.  No matter how many SAN volumes you have, they
will be invisible to the kernel unless they start at LUN 0 and are
sequential from there.

If you have SAN volumes at LUN 0 1 2 5 6 7 on your fiberchannel card,
for example, the kernel will see LUN 0 1 2 only.  Because they are not
consecutive the higher LUNs will not be visible.

Luckily for us the XIOtech MAGNITUDE SAN provides spiffy LUN masking
software so you can map any SAN volume to any LUN on any card.  I think
this would be more of a problem on other SANs where you have to have
globally unique LUNs, and therefore you can have only one volume any-
where in the fabric with LUN 0.

In that case you could have exactly one Linux server and it would have
to have the LUN 0 volume assigned to it at all times.

Well that's my understanding at least, YMMV, and I may be wrong.  If
I'm right, I hope someday someone fixes the kernel (or whatever's the
problem) so that any LUN will work.

> Thanks.

Hope this helps.  You didn't say exactly what was wrong, just that
your attempts failed, which was pretty non-specific.  If you have some
specifics I might be able to provide more assistance.

You also didn't say what kind of SAN or fabric you had..  Actually we
bought the MAGNITUDE specifically because it had really smart storage
software.  So far we haven't had any failures with it, and any problems
we had were mostly our own fault anyway.  We're wiser now.  :)

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/