Bug#740701: [Netapp-Linux-Community] Bug#740701: multipath-tools: mkfs fails "Add. Sense: Incompatible medium installed"

[Bill MacAllister]

--On Sunday, June 22, 2014 03:45:08 AM +0530 Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs at debian.org> wrote:

> On 06/22/2014 02:38 AM, Sarraf, Ritesh wrote:
>> As long as I have not succeeded to construct a proper isolated reproducible test case which fails consistently, there's not much reason to start changing or trying anything I guess.
>>
>>
>> [rrs] Thanks. Please keep us posted once you have concluded on a persistent "steps to reproduce".
>
> Bill,
>
> You reported this issue originally on a non NetApp box. From what we
> suspect, this has more to do with the UNMAP implementation in the Linux
> kernel, for which proper support was very recent.
> Would you be in a position to verify this against a newer kernel ??

Apologies for being so slow in responding.

We have a working solution after iterating through multiple
configuration changes on both the NetApp box and the debian system.
Our first consistent success came after ALUA was disabled on the
NetApp.  With a modified configuration we were able to subsequently
enable ALUA.  Unfortunately I don't know that details of the changes
made to the NetApp boxes other than what I just told you.  Here is the
working multiplath configuration we are using on the Debian systems.

 devices {
   device {
       vendor                "NETAPP"
       product               "LUN"
       failback              immediate
       features              "1 queue_if_no_path"
       hardware_handler      "1 alua"
       path_checker          directio
       path_grouping_policy  group_by_prio
       path_selector         "round-robin 0"
       prio                  "alua"
       rr_weight             uniform
       rr_min_io             128
   }
 }

As I said I am not sure exactly what modifications where made on the
NetApp, but I do know that as we upgraded our AFS servers to wheezy
we requested that the storage folks re-initialize the storage.

As to testing, we do have a system that we can make changes on, but I
am not sure it is useful at this point since we no longer see the
failure.

Bill

-- 

Bill MacAllister
Systems Programmer, Stanford University