reboot

Poor Man’s eSATA Drive Hot Swap without AHCI or Hotplug Support Under Linux

/ Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

 

 

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Unfortunately, hot-swapping an eSATA drive is a bit more complicated than hot swapping a USB drive.

First off,  your BIOS needs to support AHCI (click here for more info on AHCI), and your SATA controller also needs to support it as well. Secondly your OS, needs to specifically support hot plug, and in the case of Windows 7, it wont boot if you change to AHCI after the OS has been installed.

So, In my case I need to update firmware on lots of SATA SSDs and want to do so without rebooting, and without worrying about changing bios settings. So in order to keep things simple, I followed the procedure below.

First, you need to detect your drive. So watch dmesg to see what drive letter is assigned to your new disk upon initial connection.

#dmesg

[86527.985994]  sdd: unknown partition table
[86528.012820] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[86528.012823] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk
[86528.456281] device label btrfs devid 1 transid 11 /dev/sdd

Then, when its time to remove the disk device to the following. Subsitute your disk device letters.

# echo 1 > /sys/block/sdd/device/delete

Now you are free to swap your disk. No reboot, no bios changes, required.

Patching ESXi 4.1 via the Linux RCLI

/ Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment
PIRATE_MASK_IMAGE_rdax_65

Great Balls of Frustration… could the documentation be anymore confusing and convoluted regarding the process of patching an ESX server via the Linux remote cli.

No, I am not running windows, and no I am not on the local ESX console, and no I am not running the Vmware Management Appliance, and most of all, no I do not want outdated instructions from 2008. I just want to download some patches to my local linux destop and patch my ESX servers. Specifically I want to install the latest and greatest Qlogic drivers to troubleshoot a SAN connectivity issue that I will probably blog about at a later date.

Anyway here is how I did what I needed to do without resorting to using a windows box.

First download the driver isos to your local Linux desktop and mount the isos up locally,

mount -o loop vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-fnic_400.1.4.0.201-1vmw.2.17.00000.491446.iso /mnt

Second locate the offline-bundle directory. I moved mine off to another directory that I created specifically for the Qlogic Driver. This way I dont have to unmount and remount the iso when i patch my other boxes.

Next put the host in maint mode.

vicfg-hostops –username root –server esx04 -o enter

Then navigate to the offline_bundle directory and run the following command, replace the bundle name that I used with the bundle name in your directory

vihostupdate –server esx04 –install –bundle 841.k1.16.2-1vmw-offline_bundle-340223.zip

Wait for the following message

Please wait patch installation is in progress …
The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.

Then reboot

vicfg-hostops –username root –server esx04 -o reboot

Add a New Disk/Lun to RHEL5/CentOS5 without Rebooting

/ Christopher Paquin / 1 Comment

Ming Honestly I cannot believe that i have not put this one up on Fatmin before. I have to add new disks to RHEL servers all the time and can never remember I can never remember this procedure. I end up hitting up google all the time.

Anyway the command below causes a rescan of the scsi bus which is what you need to do for your server to detect a newly added disk. I find myself doing this on virtual machines all the time. Oh and for the love of all that is holy, please create your new disk a logical volume, and dont be lazy and just format the disk and stick a filesystem on it.

In this example I am using host0 as the target, however this may differ on your box.

echo “- – -” > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan