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Bug 199924

Summary: kpartx wwid naming problems with partitions on LUN
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Reporter: Jan Wildeboer <jwildebo>
Component: device-mapper-multipathAssignee: Ben Marzinski <bmarzins>
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 4.0CC: agk, bmarzins, christophe.varoqui, dwysocha, egoggin, junichi.nomura, kueda, lmb, mbroz, tranlan
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: 5.0.0 Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2007-02-13 20:21:28 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Jan Wildeboer 2006-07-24 12:08:38 UTC 
Description of problem:

When the wwid of a LUN ends in a digit and has partitions on it, kpartx will add
p<numebr of partition> to the wwid. However, when the wwid ends in a letter,
kpartx will just add the number, not the letter 'p'. This is causing some
problems with SAN fabric changes.

How reproducible:

Set up LUNs in SAN, add partitions to them and check kpartx output

  
Actual results:

wwid that ends in digit get p<number> added, wwid that end in a letter get just
the number added.

Expected results:

consistent output. Either always p<number> or always just <number>

Additional info:

Seems to be a problem with ATA namespace not allowing the letter-p<number>
combination according to Heinz Mauelshagen.
Comment 1 Ben Marzinski 2006-08-03 15:35:24 UTC 
Any more information on the <letters>-p<numbers> problem?  This is a pretty easy
issue to fix. It's just that i need an easy-to-distinguish partition delimiter.
My personal prefernce would be <multipath_name>-p<partition_number> or
<multipath_name>-part<partition_number>. I'd like to know if there is a problem
with them, and exactly what else won't work. Switching the '-' for a '_' would
be fine, if that is allowable. Just using <multipath_name>p<partition_number>
works fine with the user_friendly_names option set, but it's hard to see
appended on the WWID names.

Also, Somebody needs to convince me that changing the naming scheme from U4 to
U5 is a good idea, because it seems like a recipe for disaster to me.

A better solution for RHEL4 would be to have the customers who are effected by
this use the user_friendly_names option by adding

user_friendly_names  yes

to the "defaults" section of their config file. This would force all multipath
names into the mpath<number> format, which would mean that partitions would
always look like mpath<number>p<partition_number>. If they need to make sure
that the names are consistent across multiple machines, they simply need to
copy the /var/lib/multipath/bindings file from a machine where multipathing has
already been set up to the other machines that will access the same devices.
This file holds the WWID to user_friendly_names bindings.

That should fix the problem unless I am misunderstanding it. For RHEL5 I will
make sure that there is a consistent delimiter.
Comment 2 Ben Marzinski 2006-11-27 21:56:08 UTC 
There is now a consistent delimiter 'p'. If people need it to change, they must
exit /etc/rc.sysinit and /etc/udev/rules.d/40-multipath.rules, and remove the
"-p p" option from the kpartx command
Comment 3 Ben Marzinski 2007-02-13 20:21:28 UTC 
As I said in Comment #1 and #2, this is fixed in RHEL 5. It will not be fixed in
RHEL4, because it will break existing setups.