Drives Not Autostarting in a 4214R

I'm trying to boot with drives already in the chassis.

Normally what I see on the 4214R is that if you insert a hotswap drive it
powers on even when there is no host attached. That is not happening in
this case.

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
are you trying to hot-add drives while the machine is online, or just boot
with drives in the chassis ?

- LC

well... unless the drives are jumpered for motor start, they will need to
get a spin up instruction from a controller. There is an interface in the
chassis, but not a "controller" per se.

Are these drives from CPQ, or did you take some less expensive drives, and
put them in the hotswap carriers?

- LC

"CHANGE USERNAME TO westes" wrote in
message ...
I'm trying to boot with drives already in the chassis.

Normally what I see on the 4214R is that if you insert a hotswap drive it
powers on even when there is no host attached. That is not happening in
this case.

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
are you trying to hot-add drives while the machine is online, or just
boot
with drives in the chassis ?

- LC

These are "official" Compaq 15K hotswap drives (all Seagate 9GB).

I'll look for an autostart jumper, but how strange that someone would have
changed the default.

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
well... unless the drives are jumpered for motor start, they will need to
get a spin up instruction from a controller. There is an interface in the
chassis, but not a "controller" per se.

Are these drives from CPQ, or did you take some less expensive drives, and
put them in the hotswap carriers?

- LC

typically, one wouldnt need to change it.

So, is the cabinet attached to a machine when you power it on? On board
controller with the PWS, or a diff HPaq or 3rd party ? Which one, and is it
configured to send the start command to the systems.

have you tried hanging this off a workstation in the same configuration that
you know is operational ? troubleshooting is a process of elimination...

- LC

"CHANGE USERNAME TO westes" wrote in
message ...
These are "official" Compaq 15K hotswap drives (all Seagate 9GB).

I'll look for an autostart jumper, but how strange that someone would have
changed the default.

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
well... unless the drives are jumpered for motor start, they will need
to
get a spin up instruction from a controller. There is an interface in
the
chassis, but not a "controller" per se.

Are these drives from CPQ, or did you take some less expensive drives,
and
put them in the hotswap carriers?

- LC

The same W8000 is currently attached to a Compaq UW case, and those drives
start up just fine, so the system is configured to autostart the drives.

The cabinet is attached to the machine when it is powered on. The computer
is powered on after the case is powered on.

Using the Compaq W8000 onboard controller.

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
typically, one wouldnt need to change it.

So, is the cabinet attached to a machine when you power it on? On board
controller with the PWS, or a diff HPaq or 3rd party ? Which one, and is
it
configured to send the start command to the systems.

have you tried hanging this off a workstation in the same configuration
that
you know is operational ? troubleshooting is a process of elimination...

- LC

Ok...

Hrmm, W8000 on board controller. If i am not mistaken, the onboard
controller has only one external header. how are you attaching 2 cabinets to
this machine ? Is the UW hanging off the external, and the New chassis
coming off the internal header by way of a redirection cable ?

Throw me a bone here, and give me some information. Surgically extracting
every piece of information from you is getting quite tedious, and boring.


A better, more affordable architecture might be to put a fibre channel HBA
in each machine, put those pluggable cabinets to some real use by building a
workgroup SAN. They (workstations) will have the added benefit of RAID, and
take advantage of the availabilility features that are being thoroughly
wasted in their current capacity.


-LC

"CHANGE USERNAME TO westes" wrote in
message ...
The same W8000 is currently attached to a Compaq UW case, and those drives
start up just fine, so the system is configured to autostart the drives.

The cabinet is attached to the machine when it is powered on. The
computer
is powered on after the case is powered on.

Using the Compaq W8000 onboard controller.

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
typically, one wouldnt need to change it.

So, is the cabinet attached to a machine when you power it on? On board
controller with the PWS, or a diff HPaq or 3rd party ? Which one, and is
it
configured to send the start command to the systems.

have you tried hanging this off a workstation in the same configuration
that
you know is operational ? troubleshooting is a process of elimination...

- LC

We used to attach it to a Compaq UW. We removed that and want to replace
that with the 4214R. So one machine with one external interface attached
to one external cabinet.

I'll do more experiments later today and post results.

I'm with you as far as fibre channel goes. I would love to be booting our
workstations off of fibre drives and have those consolidated in location to
a central room, which would lower noise as well. The problem is how to do
this on the cheap. The cheap fibre cabinets are the Compaq fibre channel
arrays. The problem is the standard Compaq 32 and 64 bit fibre channel
adapters that work with those products do NOT allow you to boot from the
array! I understand that later generations of the host adapter do allow
this, but those adapters cost as much as the workstation does.

Do you know of anyone who makes a JBOD fibre cabinet that:

A) has some simple firewall capabilities, so we can control which hosts see
which drives.

B) is relatively cheap, and preferably plentiful on the secondary market

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
Ok...

Hrmm, W8000 on board controller. If i am not mistaken, the onboard
controller has only one external header. how are you attaching 2 cabinets
to
this machine ? Is the UW hanging off the external, and the New chassis
coming off the internal header by way of a redirection cable ?

Throw me a bone here, and give me some information. Surgically extracting
every piece of information from you is getting quite tedious, and boring.


A better, more affordable architecture might be to put a fibre channel HBA
in each machine, put those pluggable cabinets to some real use by building
a
workgroup SAN. They (workstations) will have the added benefit of RAID,
and
take advantage of the availabilility features that are being thoroughly
wasted in their current capacity.


-LC

"CHANGE USERNAME TO westes" wrote in
message ...
The same W8000 is currently attached to a Compaq UW case, and those
drives
start up just fine, so the system is configured to autostart the drives.

The cabinet is attached to the machine when it is powered on. The
computer
is powered on after the case is powered on.

Using the Compaq W8000 onboard controller.

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
typically, one wouldnt need to change it.

So, is the cabinet attached to a machine when you power it on? On
board
controller with the PWS, or a diff HPaq or 3rd party ? Which one, and
is
it
configured to send the start command to the systems.

have you tried hanging this off a workstation in the same
configuration
that
you know is operational ? troubleshooting is a process of
elimination...

- LC

ebay is your friend.

I wasnt suggesting SAN booting the workstations, thought that is a thought.

If you are patient, you can build an economical SAN with Hpaq gear. You can
get an RA4000/R4100 for next to nothing. The adapters are always being
listed, as are the hubs and switches. SC-SC cables can also be found.

Plus, the RA series uses standard SCSI drives, so you dont have to muck with
FC drives and all that.

Depending on the number of workstations you are planning on outfitting,
$1500 ~ $2000 should get you outfitted with at least 1TB across a few
chassis. And, if you have version 2.60 on the RA firmware, you can do SSP
(selective storage presentation) at the RA-Controller level. You could also
get one of the OEM brocade switches (not "modular data router") which can
also take care of the presentation for you, and probably with better
performance.

So, how cheap is cheap ? and how much space makes it worth it ?

- LC

"CHANGE USERNAME TO westes" wrote in
message ...
We used to attach it to a Compaq UW. We removed that and want to replace
that with the 4214R. So one machine with one external interface attached
to one external cabinet.

I'll do more experiments later today and post results.

I'm with you as far as fibre channel goes. I would love to be booting
our
workstations off of fibre drives and have those consolidated in location
to
a central room, which would lower noise as well. The problem is how to
do
this on the cheap. The cheap fibre cabinets are the Compaq fibre channel
arrays. The problem is the standard Compaq 32 and 64 bit fibre channel
adapters that work with those products do NOT allow you to boot from the
array! I understand that later generations of the host adapter do allow
this, but those adapters cost as much as the workstation does.

Do you know of anyone who makes a JBOD fibre cabinet that:

A) has some simple firewall capabilities, so we can control which hosts
see
which drives.

B) is relatively cheap, and preferably plentiful on the secondary market

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
Ok...

Hrmm, W8000 on board controller. If i am not mistaken, the onboard
controller has only one external header. how are you attaching 2
cabinets
to
this machine ? Is the UW hanging off the external, and the New chassis
coming off the internal header by way of a redirection cable ?

Throw me a bone here, and give me some information. Surgically
extracting
every piece of information from you is getting quite tedious, and
boring.


A better, more affordable architecture might be to put a fibre channel
HBA
in each machine, put those pluggable cabinets to some real use by
building
a
workgroup SAN. They (workstations) will have the added benefit of RAID,
and
take advantage of the availabilility features that are being thoroughly
wasted in their current capacity.


-LC

"CHANGE USERNAME TO westes" wrote in
message ...
The same W8000 is currently attached to a Compaq UW case, and those
drives
start up just fine, so the system is configured to autostart the
drives.

The cabinet is attached to the machine when it is powered on. The
computer
is powered on after the case is powered on.

Using the Compaq W8000 onboard controller.

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
typically, one wouldnt need to change it.

So, is the cabinet attached to a machine when you power it on? On
board
controller with the PWS, or a diff HPaq or 3rd party ? Which one,
and
is
it
configured to send the start command to the systems.

have you tried hanging this off a workstation in the same
configuration
that
you know is operational ? troubleshooting is a process of
elimination...

- LC

We use the RA4000, but we have never found any way to boot a Windows 2000
computer from one, using any fibre channel host adapter. Compaq is using
some weird very proprietary fibre channel variant on those boxes, and they
refuse to give us any details. I cannot get anything except a handful of
Compaq adapters to work with logical devices created on the RA4000. Maybe
the RA4100 is different?

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com

"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
news
ebay is your friend.

I wasnt suggesting SAN booting the workstations, thought that is a
thought.

If you are patient, you can build an economical SAN with Hpaq gear. You
can
get an RA4000/R4100 for next to nothing. The adapters are always being
listed, as are the hubs and switches. SC-SC cables can also be found.

Plus, the RA series uses standard SCSI drives, so you dont have to muck
with
FC drives and all that.

Depending on the number of workstations you are planning on outfitting,
$1500 ~ $2000 should get you outfitted with at least 1TB across a few
chassis. And, if you have version 2.60 on the RA firmware, you can do SSP
(selective storage presentation) at the RA-Controller level. You could
also
get one of the OEM brocade switches (not "modular data router") which can
also take care of the presentation for you, and probably with better
performance.

So, how cheap is cheap ? and how much space makes it worth it ?

- LC

"CHANGE USERNAME TO westes" wrote in
message ...
We used to attach it to a Compaq UW. We removed that and want to
replace
that with the 4214R. So one machine with one external interface
attached
to one external cabinet.

I'll do more experiments later today and post results.

I'm with you as far as fibre channel goes. I would love to be booting
our
workstations off of fibre drives and have those consolidated in location
to
a central room, which would lower noise as well. The problem is how to
do
this on the cheap. The cheap fibre cabinets are the Compaq fibre
channel
arrays. The problem is the standard Compaq 32 and 64 bit fibre channel
adapters that work with those products do NOT allow you to boot from the
array! I understand that later generations of the host adapter do
allow
this, but those adapters cost as much as the workstation does.

Do you know of anyone who makes a JBOD fibre cabinet that:

A) has some simple firewall capabilities, so we can control which hosts
see
which drives.

B) is relatively cheap, and preferably plentiful on the secondary market

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
Ok...

Hrmm, W8000 on board controller. If i am not mistaken, the onboard
controller has only one external header. how are you attaching 2
cabinets
to
this machine ? Is the UW hanging off the external, and the New chassis
coming off the internal header by way of a redirection cable ?

Throw me a bone here, and give me some information. Surgically
extracting
every piece of information from you is getting quite tedious, and
boring.


A better, more affordable architecture might be to put a fibre channel
HBA
in each machine, put those pluggable cabinets to some real use by
building
a
workgroup SAN. They (workstations) will have the added benefit of
RAID,
and
take advantage of the availabilility features that are being
thoroughly
wasted in their current capacity.


-LC

"CHANGE USERNAME TO westes" wrote
in
message ...
The same W8000 is currently attached to a Compaq UW case, and those
drives
start up just fine, so the system is configured to autostart the
drives.

The cabinet is attached to the machine when it is powered on. The
computer
is powered on after the case is powered on.

Using the Compaq W8000 onboard controller.

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
typically, one wouldnt need to change it.

So, is the cabinet attached to a machine when you power it on? On
board
controller with the PWS, or a diff HPaq or 3rd party ? Which one,
and
is
it
configured to send the start command to the systems.

have you tried hanging this off a workstation in the same
configuration
that
you know is operational ? troubleshooting is a process of
elimination...

- LC

The 4000 and the 4100 use an identical in-chassis controller (which uses the
64M BBC that the SA3200 uses, which can also be used to give a 2DH 64M cache
as well). The difference is in the drive support. The 4000 supports WUS3
drives, while the 4100 supports the U2/U3 drives and trays.

As for HBA's, I have had limited sucess with the Emuex PL7000e controllers,
while every single time I have used the CPQ FCAL PCI Adapter (
http://tinyurl.com/34wa2) I have had no problems at all. Honestly thought,
my testing has yielded that this controller is only capable of about 256
I/O's a second, and as such is not the best performing card I have used.
(sorry about the bold text.. cant make it go away...)

I have not played around with making the HBA the first controller on the
servers I have, as I have been under the impression it was not an option
anyway.

However, if you were to put an 18 or 36G U2, 68pin drive on the internal
controller for booting, and then having the data volume be on the SAN, you
would achieve a vast majority of your storage goal.

"CHANGE USERNAME TO westes" wrote in
message ...
We use the RA4000, but we have never found any way to boot a Windows 2000
computer from one, using any fibre channel host adapter. Compaq is using
some weird very proprietary fibre channel variant on those boxes, and they
refuse to give us any details. I cannot get anything except a handful of
Compaq adapters to work with logical devices created on the RA4000.
Maybe
the RA4100 is different?

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com

"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
news
ebay is your friend.

I wasnt suggesting SAN booting the workstations, thought that is a
thought.

If you are patient, you can build an economical SAN with Hpaq gear. You
can
get an RA4000/R4100 for next to nothing. The adapters are always being
listed, as are the hubs and switches. SC-SC cables can also be found.

Plus, the RA series uses standard SCSI drives, so you dont have to muck
with
FC drives and all that.

Depending on the number of workstations you are planning on outfitting,
$1500 ~ $2000 should get you outfitted with at least 1TB across a few
chassis. And, if you have version 2.60 on the RA firmware, you can do
SSP
(selective storage presentation) at the RA-Controller level. You could
also
get one of the OEM brocade switches (not "modular data router") which
can
also take care of the presentation for you, and probably with better
performance.

So, how cheap is cheap ? and how much space makes it worth it ?

- LC

"CHANGE USERNAME TO westes" wrote in
message ...
We used to attach it to a Compaq UW. We removed that and want to
replace
that with the 4214R. So one machine with one external interface
attached
to one external cabinet.

I'll do more experiments later today and post results.

I'm with you as far as fibre channel goes. I would love to be
booting
our
workstations off of fibre drives and have those consolidated in
location
to
a central room, which would lower noise as well. The problem is how
to
do
this on the cheap. The cheap fibre cabinets are the Compaq fibre
channel
arrays. The problem is the standard Compaq 32 and 64 bit fibre
channel
adapters that work with those products do NOT allow you to boot from
the
array! I understand that later generations of the host adapter do
allow
this, but those adapters cost as much as the workstation does.

Do you know of anyone who makes a JBOD fibre cabinet that:

A) has some simple firewall capabilities, so we can control which
hosts
see
which drives.

B) is relatively cheap, and preferably plentiful on the secondary
market

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
Ok...

Hrmm, W8000 on board controller. If i am not mistaken, the onboard
controller has only one external header. how are you attaching 2
cabinets
to
this machine ? Is the UW hanging off the external, and the New
chassis
coming off the internal header by way of a redirection cable ?

Throw me a bone here, and give me some information. Surgically
extracting
every piece of information from you is getting quite tedious, and
boring.


A better, more affordable architecture might be to put a fibre
channel
HBA
in each machine, put those pluggable cabinets to some real use by
building
a
workgroup SAN. They (workstations) will have the added benefit of
RAID,
and
take advantage of the availabilility features that are being
thoroughly
wasted in their current capacity.


-LC

"CHANGE USERNAME TO westes" wrote
in
message ...
The same W8000 is currently attached to a Compaq UW case, and
those
drives
start up just fine, so the system is configured to autostart the
drives.

The cabinet is attached to the machine when it is powered on.
The
computer
is powered on after the case is powered on.

Using the Compaq W8000 onboard controller.

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"NuTCrAcKeR" wrote in message
...
typically, one wouldnt need to change it.

So, is the cabinet attached to a machine when you power it on?
On
board
controller with the PWS, or a diff HPaq or 3rd party ? Which
one,
and
is
it
configured to send the start command to the systems.

have you tried hanging this off a workstation in the same
configuration
that
you know is operational ? troubleshooting is a process of
elimination...

- LC