Are any additional steps required when configuring multipath storage on a system where /var is a separate file system?
Issue
- LVM commands are hanging on certain devices
- Data corruption is occurring on SAN luns
- The multipath devices are remapping themselves while not being rebooted. This occurs while system is up and running .
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Have seen that the LUN's presented from the SAN have become read-only with the following error message:
kernel: EXT3-fs error (device dm-11): ext3_readdir: bad entry in directory #2: rec_len is smaller than minimal - offset=0, inode=0, rec_len=0, name_len=0 kernel: Aborting journal on device dm-11. kernel: ext3_abort called. kernel: EXT3-fs error (device dm-11): ext3_journal_start_sb: Detected aborted journal kernel: Remounting filesystem read-only
note: there is more than 1 cause of the above error
- One problem is with dm-multipath which appears to be mapping to the wrong LUN presented from our SAN.
- Multiple mpaths (mpath10 and mpath11) that both appear to be mapped to lun #10 and this is causing one of the mpaths (mpath 11) shows as empty.
- System was showing 100% iowait, was rebooted and now is having issues activating logical volume.
- Multipath appears to have renumbered the devices and is lost/confused about LVs on those LUNs
- Multipath appears to have mapped the same devices into multiple maps, or is reporting the wrong mpath names for certain devices
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Multipath is seeing duplicate physical volumes after a reboot, corrupting the filesystem. After a reboot, the following error appears from multipath:
# multipath -v2 remove: mpath53 (dup of mpath55) mpath53: map in use remove: mpath54 (dup of mpath56) mpath54: map in use
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Friendly names not working properly, missing /dev/mapper/mpath* names during boot which prevents volume groups being properly recognized and mounted. The following is seen during boot:
Cannot make directory [/var/lib] : Read-only file system
Environment
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
- device-mapper-multipath
- Configured to use the user_friendly_names configuration option
- Multipath bindings database file is located on /var filesystem (default location is /var/lib/multipath/bindings)
- The /var filesystem is mounted onto the root filesystem at boot time (as opposed to being a directory on the root filesystem that doesn't require a mount to be available).
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