Hi Everyone,

In working on some disk system issues I've learned about AIX support for
dynamic tracing of SAN devices
if a cable change occurs.  This has come up several time for us where we've
wanted to move a tape drive
cable to a different switch ports.

The normal procedure for this is to . . .
      disable the drive and path in tsm
      delete the rmt devices (pri and alt devices - we're using atape)
      move the cable
      run cfgmgr
      run instAtape to set alt/pri devices
      update tsm path device if it is now different
      enable drive and path

It looks like the dyntrk parm on the fscsiX adapter would basically allow
you to disable
the tape drive in tsm and  do a quick cable change.

The atape driver manual doesn't mention support for this AIX feature.

Q)  Does anyone know if it is supported by 3590 and 3592 drivers and atape?



below is a part of the  AIX v5.2 readme where the feature was introduced

=========================================
Dynamic Tracking of Fibre Channel Devices
=========================================

This release provides support for Dynamic Tracking of Fibre Channel
Devices.
Previous releases of AIX required a user to unconfigure FC storage device
and
adapter device instances before making changes on the SAN that might result
in an N_Port ID (SCSI ID) change of any remote storage ports.

If Dynamic Tracking of FC Devices is enabled, the FC adapter driver will
detect when the Fibre Channel N_Port ID of a device changes and then
re-route
traffic destined for that device to the new address while the devices are
still online.  Examples of events that can cause an N_Port ID to change are
moving a cable between a switch and storage device from one switch port to
another, connecting two separate switches via an Inter-Switch Link (ISL),
and possibly rebooting a switch.

Dynamic Tracking of FC devices is controlled by a new fscsi device
attribute,
'dyntrk'.  The default setting for this attribute is 'no'.  Setting this
attribute to 'yes', as shown in the example

chdev -l fscsi0 -a dyntrk=yes

<<< much cut >>>>


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