RHEA-2007:0808 - Product Enhancement Advisory

Topic

An enhanced device-mapper-multipath package is now available.

Description

The device-mapper-multipath packages provide tools to manage multipath
devices through the device-mapper multipath kernel module.

Enhancements included in this update are:

• Added multipath support on CCISS devices.
• Added implicit support for active-active failover (ALUA) functionality,

which will be available in upcoming EMC CLARiiON arrays.

• Added support for the mpath_prio_tpc priority callout. This allows

retrieval of priority paths from storage devices such as SAN, STK
OpenStorage D20, and Flexline 280.

• Added a "bindings_file" config file option. This allows the user to

configure where multipath will look for the user_friendly_names bindings file.

This update also fixes the following bugs:

• The multipathd init script contained several error code return commands;

some of these errors prevented the status command from being invoked. This
issue is now corrected by this update, and the status command now runs
correctly.

• When trying to identify paths and priority groups, devices that use the

dasdview command to do so would fail. This was caused by an upstream change
to dasd that replaced the "-f [device_name]" option with "[device_name]".

This change was not compatible with older versions of s390-tools (which
provides the dasdview utility). To fix this, the "-f [device_name]" option
is now enabled by default for all devices that use the dasdview command.

• Running multipath on a pSeries server connecting to a SAN environment

could result in an error. This was caused by an insufficient macro
definition of WWID_SIZE in multipath-tools-0.4.5.64/libmultipath/structs.h.
This update increases WWID_SIZE to 128, which fixes this problem.

• Multipath did not work with devices that had a UUID of more than 64

characters.

• When reading /etc/multipath.conf, multipath incorrectly processed

non-ascii characters. Now, multipath treats all non-ascii characters as
whitespace, except for those inside quoted strings.

All multipath users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
resolve these issues and add these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released
errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use
the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_58_10188

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 4 ppc

Fixes

• BZ - 231244 - Multipath command execution against HP-X128 LUNs results in displaying of errors.
• BZ - 235081 - LTC29076-multipath -ll option hangs after quiesce of a pav enabled dasd
• BZ - 237691 - multipathd can die under the right circumstances
• BZ - 238983 - multipath callouts use incorrect command line options for dasdview
• BZ - 239069 - [EMC 4.6 bug] Making sure latest hwtable.c settings for EMC CLARiiON are picked up.
• BZ - 242724 - Wrong init script
• BZ - 320151 - bindings file location is problematic for certain configurations

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)