SUMMARY - rsm6.22.1 unable to see A3500FC - any suggestions?]

Hi All

Well, this is not a definitive guide, but it may well help someone else 
in future.

First, below is an excellent missive from Scott Mickey who as well as 
some good references, gives a history of the A3500 and A1000, which are 
of the same family. I found the A1000 reset to work just fine with a 
single drive which had not been near to an A1000 and put in slot 0, then 
powerup. This creates a single LUN which RSM sees straight away.

The A3500FC was somewhat more difficult to sort out and to be honest I 
am not 100% sure what solved my problem.

The most crucial part is to get it working with a HVD SCSI interface 
first as though it is a 3500 and ignore the FC channel altogether. When 
you can see a disk LUN with probe scsi, then go for the fibre and it 
should work fine.

So with the system atatched via SCSI, probe-scsi-all starts to show what 
LUNs you have. You need to have a deafult LUN 0 which is defined as a 
disk. I managed to achieve this by putting disks which had been 
initialised on a A1000 into the 3500/D1000 chassis and it picked up some 
disk info. This then allowed me to add other disks and eventually get to 
a setup that I wanted.

The real solution is to use the serial port, but this is only for Sun 
engineers, so not really an option for us.

Sorry for the waffle, but it was a bit of a painful affair with no clear 
route to getting RSM to see it. After that it was plain sailing.

Hope this helps

Peter


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: rsm6.22.1 unable to see A3500FC - any suggestions?
Date: 	Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:28:59 -0700
From: 	Scott Mickey <mickey@denver.net>
To: 	Peter Stokes <peter@ashlyn.co.uk>



Peter Stokes, 
Here is an old Sun infodoc that someone put online: 
http://www.3113.com/dave/sun/a1000-reset.txt
The A1000 and A3500 have similar controllers and the last 
part of this doc covers A3000/A3500/A3500FC reset. 
The key is having a serial cable.  The unit's serial port 
is a DB15 connector (unlike standard serial ports that are 
DB9 or DB25).  I have not found the pin-out for this serial 
cable online and have not had time to sit down and figure out 
the pin-out myself by trial-and-error.  If you figure out a 
working pin-out for this cable, please post it in your 
summary.  The SunManagers archive has info on how to reset 
an A1000 using a serial cable.  The A3500FC should be similar. 
The D1000/A1000/A3000/A3500/A3500FC came from a NEC plant in 
Wichita, Kansas as far as I can tell.  The history goes like 
this:  NCR Wichita plant -> sold to AT&T -> sold to Hyundai 
and renamed Symbios Logic -> sold to LSI Logic and renamed 
LSI Logic Storage Systems.  The result is that data for these 
units is spread out over several companies, not just at Sun. 
The plant in Kansas reportedly "now designs and manufactures 
RAID products - chips, boards, and subsystems up to multiple 
terabytes in size".  The Sun A3500 = NCR 6285 = Symbios 3621, 
or the 6285-3621 controller.  There is a little info at NEC: 
www.ncr.com/support/support_drivers_patches.asp?Class=pc_library_raid
This is older software (1996-2001) and I'm not sure what is 
specific to the A3500FC, so use caution.  However, there may 
be useful software tools here not available from Sun. 
Also: 
http://www.info.ncr.com/Teradata/eTeradata-BrowseBy.cfm?page=Hardware%20Platform
On this page, click the "Hardware - RAID" link and then 
click on: 
"NCR Deskside Modular Arrays Product and Site Preparation Guide" 
This will download document 5605-124A.pdf 
This is a very interesting doc, as it shows deskside D1000's 
and A3000/A3500 controllers + other configurations and 
components never offered by Sun.  Look for the NCR 6285 
controller in this doc.  -It explains why the fan between 
the two A3500FC power supplies has no guard to prevent 
little screws and other debris from falling into the works. 
The 6285 (A3x00) was designed to be mounted on edge, not 
horizontally, as Sun did by rackmounting it.  With the 
controller set on edge, debris would not normally fall into 
the fan.  However with it horizontal, you have to be careful 
not to accidentally drop something into the fan and choke the 
unit.  Good luck resetting your A3500FC.  Once you have it 
responding, there are some useful docs here: 
http://www.filibeto.org/sun/lib/hardware/storedge/
- Scott Mickey 
 
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: rsm6.22.1 unable to see A3500FC - any suggestions?
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 15:08:04 +0000
From: Peter Stokes <peter@ashlyn.co.uk>
To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org

Hi All

Pretty frustrated here trying to setup an A3500FC.

I have tried on two separate systems with both 2.6 and 9 Solaris.

I have loaded the O/S (either 2.6 5/98 or Sol 9)

Added patches from patch matrix.

My Fibre card (FC100/P) works fine with A5000 and the A3500FC has an ID 
of 5 when viewed from a PC which has a Qlogic card in it.

When I load RSM 6.22.1 it loads ok, except it reports it cannot find any 
arrays.

eg

drvconfig: driver failed to attach: ssd
drvconfig: driver failed to attach: rdriver
drvconfig: driver failed to attach: rdriver
RDAC daemons initiated
WARNING: set_drivers: No arrays were found that are controlled by either 
the sd
or the ssd driver

Can someone please put me out of my misery as to where to go from here 
as I have been trying to get this sorted for a while!!

Also how can I verify if the FC100 can see the array controller or not?

Thanks

Peter
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