[SATLUG] Solaris 9 Partitions and Linux

[Henry Pugsley]

Actually Solaris on x86 can't read partitions that were created on
Sparc because of endian issues.  I found a discussion on it, and the
developers said it won't happen.  Luckily the Linux UFS driver does
the byte-swapping.

I found the real issue: the LUNs were part of a RAID, not single
disks.  I thought I was looking at 12 single disks, but it's really 2
RAID5 arrays.  For some dumb reason they presented single disks to the
Solaris servers then built a RAID across them from the host instead of
doing it on the SAN.  Either that, or the SAN driver is messed up and
is showing single disks instead of RAIDs.

-Henry

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Vinny Huckaba <satlug at vinny.us> wrote:
> If you just need to view/copy the data, you could boot the machine with
> OpenSolaris live to see the luns/data.
>
> Or convert to ZFS =)
>
> Questions:
>  Do you have the switch zoned for access from the new HBA?  Is the SAN
> configured to allow any host to access the luns?
>
> If your switch zoning or SAN hosts aren't configured, you might see
> "LUNS/WWN" of the switch or the storage controller, but they won't be the
> raw storage LUNS your looking for.
>
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Henry Pugsley <henry.pugsley at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> I have a SAN with several LUNs that were used by Solaris 9 sparc
>> servers.  They supposedly have a single UFS sitting on slice 6 of each
>> LUN.  I am trying to access the data from a RHEL 5 x86 server.  Sun
>> partition support is enabled, as is UFS support (had to custom build
>> for UFS).  In theory this should work, even with the difference in
>> platform .. the UFS driver in Linux has a byte-swapping routine that
>> handles the endian problem, and I just need read-only support.
>>
>> The major issue is that Linux won't detect the slices at all.
>> fdisk/sfdisk show an empty MSDOS partition table and they don't show
>> up in dmesg on boot like they should.  Testdisk will find a UFS
>> signature on the disk, but complains that there is no valid partition
>> table.  I can't mount the UFS since there is no partition or slice to
>> mount.
>>
>> Anyone have experience with Solaris slices/UFS in Linux?  Am I missing
>> something simple here?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Henry
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