Re: Sun E450 Drive Identification

On Sat, 2 Sep 2006 11:25:59 -0400
"Nate Criss" <[email protected]> wrote:

> I'm relatively inexperienced with Sun Hardware and I have recently acquired
> a Sun E450 with ten identical drives. Is there a way to determine which
> drive bay corresponds to sda,sdb etc?

Aaah, E450s, my favorite Sun systems. Well, if it wasn't for the bulkiness, the
noise and the power consumption. Still, they are kinda cool. And with 4x 450Mhz
CPU and 4G memory, it runs laps around my 2.4 GHz Athlon when it comes to
compiling... :-)

In a E450, the drives are physically arranged in up to five clusters of four
drives each, for a total of 20 drives maximum. Each cluster has its own
SCSI bus. The controllers are C0, C2, C3, C4 and C5, controller C1 being used
for the builtin cdrom/dvd/tapedrive and external SCSI bus. This numbering should be
apparent on the frame of the E450 itself, the numbers are next to the drive bays.

Linux names the drives in the order it finds them, which in turn will depend
on exactly how modules are loaded. Although I haven't had the time to fully
test this, on an E450 it should find the lowest drive on the left first, naming
that one "sda". The one to the right should be "sdb". Then just count upwards
from there, alternating left and right. This assumes you have no additional
drives attached to the external scsi bus or a pci card.

As for identifying a drive, in Solaris I would make it flash using cfgadm or
format->analyze->read. I'm not sure how to do this in Linux. Perhaps sdparm
can be used for that somehow. I'll look into this.

> Also, are there any issues using LVM and mdadm to do volume management on
> the Sun platform?

If there are, I haven't encountered them, apart from some nasty stuff when I
upgraded from a 2.4 to a 2.6 kernel and thus from lvm to lvm2 on my two
Ultra-5s.


Jos
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