Planning and Installation Guide


FAQs, hints, tips, and troubleshooting

This section has frequently asked questions that can help to troubleshoot problems or give hints and tips on how to do something more easily or efficiently. The first group of questions are general troubleshooting questions. They are followed by a special group of questions on how to handle the RMC ACL file. In addition, for problems with the monitoring function, see the Diagnostics chapter in IBM Cluster Systems Management for Linux Administration Guide.

Question
What troubleshooting tools are available to me?

Answer
You can always specify the verbose option (-v) on any of the installation commands and rerun the command to get more information on what the problem is.

Question
What do I do when a node that I want to specify for the cluster is said to be already defined?

Answer
Remove the node from the cluster (by using rmnode or rmnode -P) and then define it again (by using definenode), or use chnode -P to change the attributes of the node.

Question
What do I do if installms does not complete successfully?

Answer
Rerun the command and specify the verbose option (-v). This will show you where the problems occurred. The verbose option is available for this purpose on all the installation commands.

Question
How do I set up dsh?

Answer
If you are using rsh, make sure each node has a /root/.rhosts directory that contains the management server host name. Adding "rsh" to the end of /etc/securettty on each node allows root to rsh into the node. Also make sure the rsh daemon is running on each node: use chkconfig --list rsh to check it, or chkconfig rsh on to turn on rsh.

Question
What do I do if installnode does not complete successfully?

Answer
Consult the /var/log/csm/installnode.log file on the management server and /var/log/csm/makenode.log on the nodes. For a full installation, run monitorinstall -l to see detailed status of the install, or see the kickstart.log or firstboot.log file on the nodes.

Question
What do I do if I have one or more nodes that are displayed as ManagedNodes by the lsnode command and as PreManagedNodes by the lsnode -P command?

Answer
Ensure that the ctrmc daemon is running on the management server by running the following:
lssrc -s ctrmc

If the output shows that ctrmc is inoperative, run the following:

startsrc -s ctrmc

Then verify that ctrmc is now active by running the following again:

lssrc -s ctrmc

After ctrmc is active, you can run installnode again on the management server. This moves the PreManaged Nodes completely to ManagedNodes and finishes the necessary processing.

Question
How do I skip the MAC address collection during setupks?

Answer
Assign a MAC address to each node by running chnode <node> -a "Macaddr=00:01:02:03:04:05" for each node.

Question
How do I update the cluster if I change the host name of the management server?

Answer
From the management server, use dsh to run the mgmtsvr command. For example:
dsh -a /opt/bin/mgmtsvr <newhostname>
Note:
You may have to update the dsh access files (for example, the .rhosts file) because the management server host name has changed.

Question
How do I update the cluster if I change the host name of a managed node?

Answer
After you change the host name on the managed node, run the chnode command on the management server for this managed node to set the new host name.

Question
Can I install more than one management server?

Answer
Currently, only one management server is allowed per CSM cluster. In the future, more than one management server is planned for high availability.

Question
I am running into problems with the CSM installation process, and I am getting a message that the device is busy. What do I do?

Answer
Check that you are running the installms command from a temporary directory and not from the CD-ROM. Running installms from the CD-ROM causes a device-busy condition because it interferes with the mounting and unmounting of the Red Hat CD-ROMs.

Question
Does deleting a node from the cluster also uninstall the CSM RPMs from the node?

Answer
No, the CSM software is left on the node. To uninstall the CSM RPMs, type:
rpm -e csm.client csm.dsh csm.core rsct.core rsct.core.utils src

Question
If I want to pass in a null value for a hardware control point or a console server when I am running the addnode command, how do I do it correctly so that I am not prompted for the value later?

Answer
To pass in a null value to the definenode command and avoid being prompted later, use quotation marks as in the following example:
definenode -n node1 -c 1 -C" " -H" " -t netfinity

To do the same thing with the addnode command is a bit more complex. The syntax that must be used in the addnode command is as follows:

addnode -n node1 -c 1 -C\"\" -H\"\" -t netfinity

See the man pages for more details.


ACL File FAQs

The RMC ACL file is located in /var/ct/cfg/ctrmc.acls The management server uses the RMC ACL file as its authorization mechanism. You may want to update the RMC ACL file to manually fix problems during installation. The following questions and answers can guide you through the process of updating the ACL file to provide access to the resource classes on the management server to managed nodes.

Note:
Any time that the ACL file is updated, the refresh command needs to be issued in order for the updates to take effect as follows:
refresh -s ctrmc

Question
If the RMC ACL file does not exist and I need to add entries to the ACL file, what do I do?

Answer
Copy the sample ctrmc.acls file from /usr/sbin/rsct/cfg to the /var/ct/cfg directory. Study the file to learn how to add entries for specific resource classes. To make sure that the new ACL file takes effect, type:
refresh -s ctrmc

Question
How do I modify an ACL file to provide read/write access to the root user and read access to all other users on the remote node hostname1 to the following resource classes:

Answer
Open the existing ctrmc.acls file using a text editor, and add the following stanzas:
IBM.PreManagedNode
    root@hostname1  *  rw
    hostname1       *  r
 
  IBM.ManagedNode
    root@hostname1  *  rw
    hostname1       *  r
 
  IBM.NodeGroup
    root@hostname1  *  rw
    hostname1       *  r

Save and close the file. Issue the refresh command:

refresh -s ctrmc

The output when the ctrmc.acls file is listed should show the following:

IBM.PreManagedNode
  root@hostname1  *  rw
  hostname1       *  r
 
IBM.ManagedNode
  root@hostname1  *  rw
  hostname1       *  r
 
IBM.NodeGroup
  root@hostname1  *  rw
  hostname1       *  r
 
OTHER
    root@LOCAHOST  *  rw
    LOCALHOST      *  r
 

Question
How do I modify the ctrmc.acls file to provide read/write access to the root user and read access to all other users on a remote node hostname2 to the following resource classes:

Answer
Open the existing ctrmc.acls file using a text editor, and add the following entries to the existing stanzas:
 IBM.PreManagedNode
    root@hostname2  *  rw
    hostname2       *  r
 
  IBM.ManagedNode
    root@hostname2  *  rw
    hostname2       *  r
 
  IBM.NodeGroup
    root@hostname2  *  rw
    hostname2       *  r

Save and close the file. Issue the refresh command:

refresh -s ctrmc

The output when the ctrmc.acls file is listed should show the following:

IBM.PreManagedNode
  root@hostname1  *  rw
  hostname1       *  r
 
  root@hostname2  *  rw
  hostname2       *  r
 
IBM.ManagedNode
  root@hostname1  *  rw
  hostname1       *  r
 
  root@hostname2  *  rw
  hostname2       *  r
 
IBM.NodeGroup
  root@hostname1  *  rw
  hostname1       *  r
 
  root@hostname2  *  rw
  hostname2       *  r
 
OTHER
    root@LOCAHOST  *  rw
    LOCALHOST      *  r
 


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