The Linux and Unix Menagerie: Prepping For Setting Up VCS NFS Clustering On Solaris 10

Hey there,

Hope your work week is beginning swimmingly :) Mine is kind of like the end of last week, although that sentence is a bit of a non sequitur. I actually haven't stopped working, so it still is last week this week (???) You know what I mean (Although, I hope that you don't ;)

Today we're going to look at preparing your Solaris 10 system for clustering NFS (The Network File System ... the "The" is silent ;) on VCS (Veritas Cluster Server). In many ways, it's the same as setting it up on previous versions of Solaris, but it differs in many ways, as well. Apparently, I spend way too much time looking at this issue in many many ways ;)

NOTE: This post is kind of a wrapper around our previous posts on adding NFS to an existing VCS cluster and adding NFS to a VCS cluster with no down time. You can check either of those out if you want to read up on doing the VCS configuration part of the "VCS NFS" setup. This post is of purely a preparatory nature (with, admittedly, some post-installation test steps and a pointer to another old post on an uncommon Solaris 10 VCS NFS error and how to fix it).

1. First, we'll do the Solaris 10 setup. This is very important, since the SMF (Soul Macerating Futility or, possibly, Service Management Facility) has changed the way in which "services" and "run levels" are either dealt with or completely subverted ;)

a. If you're going to be depending on VCS for NFS management, it will interest you to know that VCS won't have anything to do with NFS if you want to use it on your own (on the same machine). For that reason, we're going to use svccfg to "delete" the following services, rather than using svcadm to "disable" them.

host # svccfg delete -f svc:/network/nfs/server:default
host # svccfg delete -f svc:/network/nfs/mapid:default
host # svccfg delete -f svc:/network/nfs/status:default
host # svccfg delete -f svc:/network/nfs/nlockmgr:default

b. Doing the above may (actually, should) kill the lockd and statd daemons that are probably already running (I'm trying not to be too presumptuous ;) If that's the case, you'll need to start those up again.

host # (/usr/lib/nfs/lockd &)
host # (/usr/lib/nfs/statd &)

VCS will take care of starting them once it's good to go.

If the above way of starting those services from the command line seems goofy, check out our aging post on what to do when nohup hangs up anyway from way back when. It's a fair read and may still be interesting to a certain degree ;)

c. Finally, you just need to make one directory, for convenience's sake (and also so that the "NFSRestart" resource will actually work):

host # mkdir /opt/VRTSvcs/lock

2. Now (whooshing right past the "actual" VCS NFS setup (referenced above from two previous posts on that subject), you're ready to do a few simple tests.

a. Once you have NFS running on VCS on your primary node, pick another node (we'll just assume you picked the secondary) and test that the NFS mount is up and working like VCS says it is (You can't always take it at its word):

host2 # showmount -e host
export list for host:
/that/vcs/nfs/directory/share (everyone)

Then just make sure you can actually mount the share.

b. Then fail over to your secondary node and run the same test on the primary:

host # showmount -e host2
export list for host2:
/that/vcs/nfs/directory/share (everyone)

Again, mount the share just to be sure everything's in working order.

c. If you encounter an error while running "showmount" on either server, like this:

showmount: host: RPC: Rpcbind failure - RPC: Authentication error

accompanied by your being able to generate this error (although, not necessarily):

host # rpcinfo -p host
rpcinfo: can't contact portmapper: RPC: Authentication error; why = Failed (unspecified error)

be sure to check out our previous post on this little Solaris 10 VCS NFS gotcha and, hopefully, you'll end up knowing more than you ever wanted to about how to straighten that out :)

And, finally, in an out-of-sequence-series of only four posts, you're finally done setting up NFS in VCS on Solaris 10. Hopefully, you finished a long time ago. It's been six months since some of the referenced posts were originally published. Over time, it gets getting harder and harder to dot all the i's on this blog ;)

Cheers,

, Mike