On Mon, 2009-04-13 at 15:37 -0500, Benjamin Marzinski wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 03:56:05PM -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote:
> > On Mon, 2009-04-13 at 13:57 -0500, Benjamin Marzinski wrote:
> > > On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 05:00:05AM -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote:
> > > > Thank you. I'll detail our script and the logic behind it in a separate
> > > > email in case it is helpful to others.
> > > >
> > > > In the meantime, we have a critical problem where the script which was
> > > > working perfectly in 5.2 is now broken in 5.3. Is there any way to
> > > > deconfuse the 5.3 multipathd or any other immediate solution? - John
> > >
> > > What christophe said is correct. In RHEL 5.3, multipath started copying
> > > all of the necessary callouts into it own private namespace. It scans
> > > through your config file, and pulls out all the binaries. However,
> > > there are two problems that are affecting you. First, it only pulls the
> > > command, "/bin/bash" in you case, not the arguments, which for
> > > you include a script to run. Second, it's private namespace only
> > > consists of /sbin, /bin, /tmp, a couple of virtual filesystems, like
> > > /proc and /sys (well, actually there are a couple of others, like /etc,
> > > that multipath needs to start up, but you shouldn't rely on them being
> > > there all the time, since you can lose access to them if the device
> > > they're on goes down)
> > >
> > > There are two ways to deal with this. First is to rewrite the
> > > prioritizer in C. I realize that this is a pain, but it will be
> > > necessary to run on RHEL6 and new fedora machines, which use upstream's
> > > prio functions instead of callout binaries.
> > >
> > > The second, quicker way is to move your callout to /sbin and add a dummy
> > > device section to make sure it gets picked up.
> > >
> > > devices {
> > > ...
> > > device {
> > > vendor "dummy"
> > > product "dummy"
> > > prio_callout "/sbin/mpath_prio_ssi"
> > > }
> > > }
> > >
> > > This will cause multipathd to copy your script into the private
> > > namespace, and everything should work, with one exception.
> > >
> > > bash is not a statically linked executable. It links to libraries,
> > > and multipathd doesn't make its own copies of them. Under normal
> > > operation this will work (/lib is also in multipathd's
> > > private namespace). However, if you lose access to /lib, bash won't
> > > work, and multipathd won't be able to restore access to your devices.
> > > If you aren't planning on multipathing / or /lib you might choose to
> > > ignore this (The exact same problem exists in 5.2).
> > >
> > > I don't believe that there is a statically linked shell in RHEL 5.
> > > This is another reason to convert your callout to a C program. Or
> > > you can recompile bash with static linking.
> > >
> > > -<snip>
> > Thanks very much for the explanation. If I understand correctly, 5.2
> > also copied into a ramfs but not a separate namespace and that's why it
> > worked in 5.2?
>
> Not quite. multipathd had a private namespace in 5.2. but it didn't
> unmount all of the unnecessary mountpoints. This was changed in 5.3 for
> two reasons.
>
> 1. Otherwise if you unmounted a filesystem that had been mounted before
> you started multipathd, and then tried to remove the device, you
> couldn't, since the private namespace still had it open.
>
> 2. To catch configurations like yours. In RHEL 5.2, multipathd started
> up and worked, but if you ever lost access to /usr/local/sbin,
> multipathd would stop working. By unmounting the filesystems that could
> potentially disappear (or at least most of them), you can force people
> to do things in a way that makes multipathd fault tolerant.
>
> In rhel 5.2, multipath didn't make a private, in-memory copy of your
> script. It just used the one on the regular filesystem, which is the
> very thing that the private namespace was trying to avoid.
>
> > In any event, we attempted to implement the less preferred method for
> > the sake of time right now (none of us are particularly adept at C and
> > are not sure how we'd feed the configuration file if it is not safe to
> > pull files from disk). We moved mpath_prio_ssi to /sbin and called it
> > directly in multipath.conf, i.e.,
> > prio_callout "/sbin/mpath_prio_ssi %n"
>
> Sorry for the confusion. You still need to call your script with
> /bin/bash in your actual device section, just like you originally were.
> But you also need a dummy device section to cause multipathd to pull
> that script into the private namespace. In the dummy device section, you
> need to reference the script directly. This is because multipathd only
> pulls in commands, not their arguments (even if the argument is a script
> to run). When I tested this setup before my first email, my
> multipath.conf devices section looked like this:
>
> devices {
> device {
> vendor "WINSYS"
> product "SF2372"
> path_grouping_policy group_by_prio
> prio_callout "/bin/bash /sbin/mpath_prio_one"
> }
> device {
> vendor "dummy"
> product "dummy"
> prio_callout "/sbin/mpath_prio_one"
> }
> }
>
> mpath_prio_one is a bash script that just echos 1.
>
> -Ben
Ah, got it. It worked. Thanks very, very much - John
> >
> > It still does not work but this time we get:
> > Apr 13 15:33:15 kvm01 multipathd: error calling out /sbin/mpath_prio_ssi
> > sdq
> > Apr 13 15:33:15 kvm01 multipathd: /sbin/mpath_prio_ssi exitted with 255
> >
> > If we revert to
> > prio_callout "/bin/bash /sbin/mpath_prio_ssi %n"
> > we return to:
> > Apr 13 15:34:43 kvm01 multipathd: error calling
> > out /bin/bash /sbin/mpath_prio_ssi sdc
> > Apr 13 15:34:43 kvm01 multipathd: /bin/bash exitted with 127
> >
> > We thought the script might need an explicit exit code so we changed
> > everything to exit 0 but that did not fix the problem. Any idea why we
> > are getting this 255 error? Thanks - John
> > --
> > John A. Sullivan III
> > Open Source Development Corporation
> > +1 207-985-7880
> > jsullivan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> >
> > http://www.spiritualoutreach.com
> > Making Christianity intelligible to secular society
> >
> > --
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> > dm-devel@xxxxxxxxxx
> > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/dm-devel
>
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--
John A. Sullivan III
Open Source Development Corporation
+1 207-985-7880
jsullivan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.spiritualoutreach.com
Making Christianity intelligible to secular society
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