[rescue] A tale of two Sun A5000's

[Jonathan Katz]

Firmware is done via luxadm command  (solaris) over the fcal.

Never heard of backplane issues with them.

On Solaris I remeber OS patches and array firmware had to be aligned.

Sent from my iPhone, pardon the typos!
Jonathan Katz
317-829-4810 Indianapolis (USA)

On Mar 30, 2010, at 21:47, Mr Ian Primus <ian_primus at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Well, I've been tinkering with this Sun E4500 (running Linux), as  
> well as a couple of A5000 disk arrays. The A5000's are both the 14- 
> slot versions. I had one of the arrays working OK, but with  
> occasional I/O errors I attributed to flakey old 9 gig disks. Well,  
> I got some shiny new used disks in the mail, removed all the old 9's  
> and inserted one new disk. It throws some errors, buffer I/O errors  
> and command aborts. Low level format the disk with sg_format,  
> partition, and go to mkfs the newly created partition - command  
> aborts, the bus hangs up. Try again, same thing. Try another disk,  
> same thing.
>
> Enter the other A5000. This one was dirty and beat up, and had a  
> faulty display module, one missing power supply, and three bad fans.  
> Replace the display module with a used one from eBay and it comes  
> back to life. Throw my disks in that, connect it up... works  
> perfectly (amid the din of worn-out fan bearings). So, now I know  
> it's not the disks.
>
> So far, I've swapped both my I/O boards between the arrays, as well  
> as the GBIC. Testing only with one disk in front slot 0, everything  
> always works perfectly on the "beat up" array, but fails with  
> command aborts and bus resets on the "nice" array - even when I keep  
> the same disk, I/O boards and GBIC in the picture.
>
> Paging through the configuration menus, both of them seem to be  
> configured the same way, the only difference I can see between the  
> two is the working array runs firmware version 1.05 while the faulty  
> array runs version 1.07.
>
> So, what is there left to swap? The only thing I can think of is a  
> firmware bug or something - but where does the firmware live on this  
> beast? How can I flash it? Or do I have to change the interconnect  
> module in the middle of the thing?
>
> Any ideas?
>
> -Ian
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