Grappling with HP ServiceGuard (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Last night's planned change was supposed to last about two hours: get in, install some patches, switch some cluster resources around the nodes, install some more patches and get out. The fact that the installation involved a HP-UX system didn't get me down, even though we only work with Sun Solaris and Tru64. The fact that it involved a ServiceGuard cluster did make me a little apprehensive, but I felt confident that the procedures $CLIENT had supplied me would suffice.

Everything went great, until the 80% mark... Failing the applications back over to their original node failed for some reason and the cluster went into a wonky state. The cluster software told me everything was down, even though some of the software was obviously still running. The cluster wouldn't budge, not up, nor down. And that's when I found out that I rather dislike HP ServiceGuard, all because of one stupid flaw.

You see, all the other cluster software I know provides me with a proper listing of all the defined resources and their current state. Sun Cluster, Veritas Cluster Service and Tru Cluster? All of them are able to give me neat list of what's running where and why something went wrong. Well, not HP Damn ServiceGuard. Feh!

We ended up stopping the database manually and resetting all kinds of flags on the cluster software. Finally, after six hours (instead of the original two), I got off from work around 23:00. Yes... /me heartily dislikes HP ServiceGuard.

Posted in: cluster , hewlett packard , hp-ux , serviceguard

I've never liked HP-UX that much ... (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

I've never been overly fond of HP-UX, mostly sticking to Solaris and Mac OS X, with a few outings here and there. Given the nature of one of my current projects however, I am forced to delve into HP's own flavour of Unix.

You see, I'm building a script that will retrieve all manner of information regarding firmware levels, driver versions and such so we can start a networkwide upgrade of our SAN infrastructure. With most OSes I'm having a fairly easy time, but HP-UX takes the cake when it comes to being backwards :[

You see, if I want to find out the firmware level for a server running HP-UX I have two choices:
1. Reboot the system and check the firmware revision from the boot prompt.
2. Use the so-called Support Tools Manager utility, called [x,m,c]stm.

CSTM is the command line interface to STM and thank god that it's scriptable. In reality the binary is a CLI menu driven system, but it takes an input file for your commands.

For those who would like to retrieve their firmware version automatically, here's how:

...

Uhm... FSCK! *growl* *snarl* What the heck is this?! For some screwed up reason my shell keeps on adding a NewLine char after the output of each command. That way a variable which gets its value from a string of commands will always be "$VALUE\n". WTF?! o_O

I'm going to have to bang on this one a little more. More info later.

Posted in: command , firmware version , hp-ux , retarded , sysadmin