Mastering UNIX® Shell Scripting: Bash, Bourne, and Korn Shell Scripting for Programmers, System Administrators, and UNIX Gurus, Second Edition

CHAPTER21

Turning On/Off SSA Identification Lights

If your system utilizes the Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) disk subsystem from IBM, you understand how difficult it is to find a specific failed disk in the hundreds of disks that populate the racks. Other needs for SSA disk identification include finding all of the drives attached to a particular system. Then you may also want to see only the drives that are in currently varied-on volume groups or a specific group of disks. In revising this book, I thought about deleting this chapter; however, many shops still use SSA, and this chapter has some very good shell scripting techniques, so I decided to keep this topic. Even if you do not utilize SSA disks, please stick around and follow through the scripting techniques to pick up a few scripting tips.

In identifying hardware components in a system, you usually have a set of tools for this function. This chapter is going to concentrate on AIX systems. The script presented in this chapter is valid only for AIX, but with a few modifications it can run on other UNIX flavors that utilize the SSA subsystem. I am sticking to AIX because this script has an option to query volume groups, which not all UNIX flavors support. If your systems are running the Veritas filesystem, then only a few commands need to be modified for my identification script to work because Veritas supports the concept of a volume group.

In identifying an SSA disk you have two ways of referencing the disk. In AIX all ...