Hi Experts!
Gwinter.nlm abended last night. Rebooted the server to clear this abend. (remotely - server did not appear to come back up - offices were now closed)
Called the offices this morning to find that there is an error on the server.
Tell me if i'm wrong or not..
Netware uses local nlm's to load the raid array? I'm not totally sure here. Bit of a beginner and haven't had to deal with something this critical.
I get an error upon bootup - "scanning for devices and partitions"
I get a critical error after loading the raid.ham etc..
It loads up the dos prompt and runs the bootup section, starts loading nlm's and i then get that error. The drives don't have and erroneous lights on them, therefore should be intact?
The current set up is an IBM x226 with a ServerRAID 6i card. 3x 73GB SCSI drives in RAID1 + Hot Spare.
Can anyone suggest what has happened and what the next course of action should be?
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After loading server -ns then
loadstage 1
loadstage 2
startup.ncf (load ipsraid.ham, etc)
issuing 'scan.nlm' at this point causes the same problem as when the server is booted - critical error and a halt.
Anything nss/nssmu related at any point seems to fail to load. nssmu mentioned no ip/ipx/tdp/udp etc was found as the only error and further attempts to load it result in the screen flashing up slightly then disappeared.
A third party utility seems to show the NSS volumes intact but it seems the OS can not see them...
I'm using portlock to image the current server to my local FTP site.
We have an image of this server from April last year. I am going to blank the server and reimage the SYS and the DOS partition from the old image and then pull the data/gwise volumes from the new image.
I will end up with some old data (sys and dos) and the new data from the new server image.
Can anyone suggest a reason why this wouldnt' work?
Thanks.
Apologies for not getting back sooner, I was going to wait until I had a NW server handy to figure out why the nss checks won't play nice. This is a job that can definitely be done, I've done it myself on several occasions, but as always it's a little difficult to diagnose without having something in front of you to try it on.
The portlock idea should work, but just remember that your eDirectory is on the sys volume, so it will revert to what it was last year.
Hi
I have finally got to the end of it. It seemed that the nss pools were somehow a bit mangled and I wasn't able to diagnose/fix it from the dos prompt.
However, i had a bit of a thought during this process. I decided to portlock the 'broken' server to a local ftp site and then portlock it back. But this time, only pulling the DOS partition from the old server image. Theoretically, I thought if the nss pools are mangled like so and something may be wrong with the DOS partition.. After re-creating the pools with the portlock image, things MIGHT work!
So along i go and restored DOS (old) and SYS (latest) volumes and it booted without errors. Finally :)
This is with up-to-date DATA/Edir. Finished off writing back the data directories and tested boot one final time. Created a backup -> tape job to finish and signed off the project.
Thanks for your help! :)
Any idea why things like this actually happen? I'm assuming files could have gotten corrupt on the array, just after the last reboot of the server and possibly, may not be linked to the gwinter abend.
It's usually down to having stuff in memory which hasn't been flushed to disc yet. The abend causes said data to be lost instead of writen to disc. This isn't confined to Netware and pretty much applies to all filesystems which make use of caching. This is why decent raid cards have battery backup so the sudden removal of power doesn't lose uncommitted data, but when it's being done in software you're relying on how well the system can cope with a serious error and whether or not it can flush pending transactions before it completely implodes.
it would be nice to know the error message you were getting when the RAID.HAM driver loaded (this is the RAID controller driver - then there is usually an associated .CDM for the disks itself - no .NLM's load the disk/RAID drivers)
Additionally, you don't need to load your network drivers to get access to your disks.
However, if you are having problems mounting the NSS volumes (assuming you get past what sounds like a bad RAID card hardware or a corrupted RAID.HAM driver file) you would do a NSS /poolverify to make sure the NSS pools are okay and then a NSS /poolrebuild to fix the issues found with the verify. Repeat the poolverify to make sure the problems are gone.
http://www.novell.com/docu
Then reboot the server to make sure the pools come up and then the network drivers will load when the SYS volume is found.
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by: alextoftPosted on 2008-02-22 at 04:55:08ID: 20956699
Netware uses DOS as a bootstrap, then after the server.exe is loaded it runs the startup.ncf file (a batch file, as it were) which loads the basic hardware drivers (ham = host adapter module).
If you're getting to the "scanning for devices and partitions" stage, your raid driver will already be loaded, so potentially you could be looking at a filesystem error.
If, from DOS (press escape to abort OS load, or use f3 to interrupt the autoexec.bat dos boot), you start the server using "server -na -ns" it will load without running either the startup.ncf or autoexec.ncf files. This should drop you to a prompt.
From there you can manually load your raid driver and run an nss /poolverify=SYS to see if the pool contains errors. If it does, you can then fix them with nss /poolrebuild=SYS
Alternatively you can boot the server using server -z"/poolautodeact=SYS" (including the quotes), then run your nss checks.