In addition to the items listed in “Requirements” in Chapter 1, using an SGI ProPack client-only node to support CXFS requires the following hardware and software specified in the release notes:

The following commands are shipped as part of the CXFS SGI ProPack package:

The cxfs_client and xvm commands are needed to include a client-only node in a CXFS cluster. The cxfs_info command reports the current status of this node in the CXFS cluster. For more information, see the man pages.

You should monitor the /var/log/cxfs_client and /var/log/messages log files for problems.

Look for a Membership delivered message to indicate that a cluster was formed.

The Linux platform uses the logrotate system utility to rotate the cxfs_client logs:

SGI ProPack supports the CXFS mount scripts. See “CXFS Mount Scripts” in Chapter 1 and the CXFS Administration Guide for SGI InfiniteStorage.

The following sections highlight limitations and considerations for client-only SGI ProPack nodes.

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Note: For limitations and considerations for any SGI ProPack node, see the information in CXFS Administration Guide for SGI InfiniteStorage.

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Installing the CXFS client software for SGI ProPack requires approximately 50-200 MB of space, depending upon the packages installed at your site.

To install the required software on an SGI ProPack client-only node, SGI personnel will do the following:

The cxfs_utils package includes a Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) agent for monitoring CXFS heartbeat, CMS status and other statistics. If you want to use this feature, you must also install the following PCP packages:

These packages and are included on the first and second SGI ProPack CDs (respectively). You can obtain the open source PCP package from ftp://oss.sgi.com/projects/pcp/download

To verify that the CXFS software has been installed properly, use the rpm -q command to query the packages.

To verify the SGI ProPack release, display the /etc/sgi-release file.

You can modify the CXFS client daemon (/usr/cluster/bin/cxfs_client ) by placing options in the cxfs_client.options file:

/etc/cluster/config/cxfs_client.options

The available options are documented in the cxfs_client man page.

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Caution: Some of the options are intended to be used internally by SGI only for testing purposes and do not represent supported configurations. Consult your SGI service representative before making any changes.

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For example, to see if cxfs_client is using the options in cxfs_client.options, enter the following:

propack# ps -ax | grep cxfs_client
 3612 ?        S      0:00 /usr/cluster/bin/cxfs_client -i cxfs3-5
 3841 pts/0    S      0:00 grep cxfs_client

When cxfs_client needs to rescan disk buses, it executes the /var/cluster/cxfs_client-scripts/cxfs-reprobe script. This requires the use of parameters in SGI ProPack due to limitations in the Linux SCSI layer. You can export these parameters from the /etc/cluster/config/cxfs_client.options file.

The script detects the presence of the SCSI and/or XSCSI layers on the system and defaults to probing whichever layers are detected. You can override this decision by setting CXFS_PROBE_SCSI and/or CXFS_PROBE_XSCSI to either 0 (to disable the probe) or 1 (to force the probe) on the appropriate bus.

When an XSCSI scan is performed, all buses are scanned by default. You can override this decision by specifying a space-separated list of buses in CXFS_PROBE_XSCSI_BUSES. (If you include space, you must enclose the list within single quotation marks.) For example, for SGI ProPack 4:

export CXFS_PROBE_XSCSI_BUSES='/dev/xscsi/pci01.03.0-1/bus /dev/xscsi/pci02.01.0-2/bus'

For SGI ProPack 5:

export CXFS_PROBE_XSCSI_BUSES='/dev/xscsi/pci0001:00:03.0-1/bus /dev/xscsi/pci0002:00:01.0-2/bus'

When a SCSI scan is performed, a fixed range of buses/channels/IDs and LUNs are scanned; these ranges may need to be changed to ensure that all devices are found. The ranges can also be reduced to increase scanning speed if a smaller space is sufficient.

The following summarizes the environment variables (separate multiple values by white space and enclose withing single quotation marks):

For example, the following would only scan the first two SCSI buses:

export CXFS_PROBE_SCSI_BUSES='0 1'

The following would scan 16 LUNs on each bus, channel, and ID combination (all on one line):

export CXFS_PROBE_SCSI_LUNS='0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15'

Other options within the /etc/cluster/config/cxfs_client.options file begin with a - character. Following is an example cxfs_client.options file:

propack# Example cxfs_client.options file
#
-Dnormal -serror
export CXFS_PROBE_SCSI_BUSSES=1
export CXFS_PROBE_SCSI_LUNS='0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20'

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Note: The - character or the term export must start in the first position of each line in the cxfs_client.options file; otherwise, they are ignored by the cxfs_client service.

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