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CHAPTER 17 Xdiskbuild
17.1 Introduction
This builder modular (enhance disk drive builder) is designed to specifically for Solaris Systems using the Solstice Volume Manager. It is designed to protect the non-root disk drives that are either part of an array or external to the unit. The x disk builder offers a convention several click method of completely rebuilding, reformed a damaged disk drive.
When a non-root disk drive is damaged or becomes corrupt it is easily rebuilt using this module. For example, if a drive has a hardware failure a replacement drive is inserted to replace the defective drive and the X disk builder module is invoked. This is invoked from the main menu of the bare metal product. The damage disk after it is replaced will show up as being present but not being formatted, it is selected in and in the button rebuild on the bottom of the menu is selected, this will force a complete rebuild of the disk drive and the commands will be automatically invoked to fully recover this disk from the master backup.
he disk builder module does this by saving the configuration setting of the working system this is done the first time you involve the builder module and also can be done interactively from the File> Save > Configuration Settings choice of the builder menu.
All of the pertinent information about all of the non-root disk drives is saved including geometry, file systems, mount points, file systems sizes, and media device information. This information is then used during the reconstruction to rebuild the system exactly like it was.
17.2 Configuration file
The X disk builder module is designed to be highly customized for your system. There is a configuration file which accompanies this product and should be modified and then inserted as a section into the master.ini file to inform the X disk builder module of your particular set-up. This is design primarily toindicate to the X disk builder module which media devices you would like to be recognized for each disk drive. You will set a series of disk drives names on the left, and set them equal to a array of media device disk, for example, if your physical first disk (assuming your root disk is disk 0) is our controller 0 and target 1, the stem name of this is C0T1D0. Cordially for example if you had a media device called D4 and D6, on this physical disk you would set-up an entry as follow:
C0T1D0 = "D4 D6"
This indicated when you select the disk on controller 0 target 1; you have indicated that the X disk builder module will rebuild the file systems that are part of media device D4 and media device D6. This enables you to have a very flexible way of controlling how the X disk builder module works. For example, in most cases you will want to exclude the swap partition since this really requires no special formatting, a file system or resurrection of data.
The X disk builder module does allow multiple selections of disk drives and when this is used all of the disk drives that are selected will be rebuilt at once. The command that is queued will restore all of the file systems that are on the selected disk drives.
There are many capabilities in the X disk builder module and a tool sub-menu that will give you some flexible uses of the product for advance users. It is not normally necessary to use the tools menu however this is provided for the benefit of advance users. The next section will describe each of the menu choices and exactly what action will be performed when it is selected.
FIGURE 75. Xdiskbuild's interface.
17.3 Tools submenu
"Zap Drive". Writes zeroes to the first 160.000ë of physical disk, i.e partition 2. After this operation the disk loses all data, label, partition table.
"Clear Selected Disk Meta Devices" unmounts and removes all metadevices from selected disk.
"Initialize Selected Disk Meta Devices" creates all metadevices on selected disk, but does not mount them.
"Initialize All Meta Devices" creates all metadevices on the system. Same as if you typed "metainit -a" at the shell prompt.
"Restamp Meta Database" removes the replicas from database, then creates them again. This is useful if the database is corrupted or completely destroyed.
"Unmount all Filesystems" unmounts all filesystems on the system. Ignores the errors if the filesystem is busy or cannot be unmounted for any reasons.
"Mount all Filesystems" mounts all filesystems on the system. Ignores the errors if the filesystem is bad, busy or cannot be mounted for any reasons.
"Enter Runlevel 2" switches the OS to runlevel 2. Same as command "init 2".
17.4 How to Setup
All you need to do is to specify your settings for xdiskbuild. This is done by clicking on the Settings Menu option under Setup. Then click on the Xdikbuild button. These fields should be edited with the values as explained below. These settings can also be changed by editing the master.ini file. This file is normally present in the /usr/bp/bpinit/ directory. Instead of using Settings Menu you can edit your master.ini directly with text editor. The example of settings is already there.
Edit the section [DiskRebuild] example below:
[DiskRebuild]
Device="sctape"
c0t0d0="d6 d7"
c0t1d0="d10 d11 d13"
c2t0d0="d30"
StopApplications="/etc/rc0.d/K95dbora stop"
; Command to stop all applications
StartApplications="/etc/rc0.d/K95dbora start"
; Command to start all applications
; On what physical drives is the configuration information for the meta databases kept?
MetaDatabase="/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s3 /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s7"
; How many copies of this configuration information do we keep per disk?
MetaCopyCount="2 "
As soon as this is complete start and stop xdiskbuild. The first start will automatically save your disk configuration.
17.5 Licensing.
Xdiskbuild is licensed as a feature of your license. Please make sure that your unit has string "XDB" in it's features. Run admin utility then pick up [Setup]->[License Management] and check the Features field. If you don't see word "XDB" there, then you will have to extend your license and apply for new license key.
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