[Lustre-discuss] Lustre 1.6.5.1 on X4200 and STK 6140 Issues

[Ms. Megan Larko]

Hello,

Reading through the message from Malcolm Cowe about a new lustre
environment, he mentioned that there were "unknown symbol" warnings
during his installation procedure.   Well, I also saw warnings when I
was doing a lustre 1.6.5.1 install.   I know from general linux that
the rpm is not properly installed while there are so many warning and
of the type (some were ldiskfs issues for example) that I was seeing.
  What I discovered is that the order in which the lustre 1.6.5.1 rpms
are installed does matter and that it is not the same order as
indicated in the Lustre Manual version 1.12 for 1.6.4.

The order I used which generated no "unknown symbol" errors for
installation of lustre 1.6.5.1 was this:
1)   kernel-lustre-smp-2.6.18-53.1.14.el5_lustre.1.6.5.1.x86_64.rpm

If using infiniband (IB) this is next:
2)   kernel-ib-1.3-2.6.18_53.1.14.el5_lustre.1.6.5.1smp.x86_64.rpm

3)   lustre-ldiskfs-3.0.4-2.6.18_53.1.14.el5_lustre.1.6.5.1smp.x86_64.rpm

4)   lustre-modules-1.6.5.1-2.6.18_53.1.14.el5_lustre.1.6.5.1smp.x86_64.rpm

5)   lustre-1.6.5.1-2.6.18_53.1.14.el5_lustre.1.6.5.1smp.x86_64.rpm

The above were done using rpm -i (install) which works well for
kernels so that you have multiple versions (hopefully including a good
one to which one may return if necessary).

The last cannot be done using -i, but -U:
rpm -Uvh e2fsprogs-1.40.7.sun3-0redhat.x86_64.rpm

This has not been a problem for us as the newer version seems to get
along fine with a 1.6.4.3 version of Lustre (I appreciate backwards
compatibility).

If a module installation does have many "unknown symbol" references,
then find the rpm which will satisfy those references and install that
module.   To actually have them satisfied one must return to the
package that had complained about the "unknown symbol" and having
already installed the package to satisfy those symbols then "rpm
--force -ivh"  to force a retry of the package with the issues.
This procedure can be iterative as sometimes more than one package may
be needed to satisfy all the references of the package desired.  I do
know from personal experience that if a package has "unknown symbols"
especially if those symbols are used/accessed, then it can panic the
box.

My experience with this in on  64-bit hw using Cent OS 5 as the base
Operating System.

Best of luck.

megan