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Do not activate the SP Switch and SP Switch2 advanced diagnostic facility until you have read this section completely, and understand this material. If you are not certain how to properly use this facility, or if you are not under the guidance of the IBM Support Center, do not activate this facility. Activating this facility may result in degraded performance of your system. Activating this facility may also result in longer response times, higher processor loads, and the consumption of system disk resources. Activating this facility may also obscure or modify the symptoms of timing-related problems. |
You can run advanced switch diagnostic tests when you suspect that a component in the switch network is not performing properly. These tests must be run from the control workstation, with the exception of the Adapter Error Log Analyzer (ELA), which may be run from any switch node. The reason for running a diagnostic test is usually an error reported in the system error log, or one of the CSS log files. In many cases, it is difficult to isolate the cause of these errors. This is because the same error may be caused by a hardware failure of different network components, and because the error may be caused by other reasons, such as the network being initialized by the switch management software.
If you detect such errors, you may decide to invoke an appropriate diagnostic test, as explained in the following sections. These tests help to identify the failing component, and determine whether your system has a "real" hardware problem or not. The "positive" result of a test is a message that indicates a hardware failure. In this case, contact IBM hardware support.
Detailed information about the commands used to invoke these tests can be found in PSSP: Command and Technical Reference.
There are cases in which the test reports software errors. This indicates either a temporary error condition (for example, the Estart command is invoked while the test is running, in which case the test should be restarted), or a permanent problem in the test itself, or in other PSSP software. For these cases, contact the IBM Support Center. The displayed message contains the number of the node reporting the problem.
Before calling IBM, save the following information: node number of the primary node and the reporting node; and the log file, spd.trace on the primary node and on the reporting node. For the SP Switch, the log file is in directory /var/adm/SPlogs/css. For the SP Switch2, the log file is located on the port level directory. It has a path name of /var/adm/SPlogs/css0/p0 or /var/adm/SPlogs/css1/p0. Refer to SP Switch2 log and temporary file hierarchy.
During the test, different messages are displayed on the SPD GUI (graphical user interface for SP Switch and SP Switch2 diagnostics) or to your console. These messages include several fields: node ID of the reporting node, its personality (primary, backup or secondary), timestamp, type of the message, and the message itself. There are several types of messages: informational messages, warnings, and errors. Warnings and error messages are marked by "!" and "E" respectively (in the proper field on the GUI). You can ignore informational messages (which do not have such marks).
For detailed information about warning and error messages, see PSSP: Messages Reference.