7:00 AM
El DiPablo
A couple of weekends ago my company who shall not be named received a notice from building management that they were going to be shutting power down to the office building for electrical maintenance. Because of that, I had my Systems Administrator go in the night before to cleanly power down all of our networking gear, and servers.
The next day when maintenance was over, my Systems Administrator came in and powered everything back up. Everything came up fine, but that is when we noticed a very serious problem. Our Buffalo TeraStation TS-RIXL unit was no longer serving LUNs to our Xen Servers!
When we tried to connect the LUNs, Xen could find the IQN fine, but it couldn't detect any of the LUNs. I wanted to rule out that this was a Xen server issue, so I tried it from a Windows host as well and I had the same thing. The IQN was found, but no LUN! WTF!
My Systems Administrator called Buffalo Tech Support and those idiots actually said that because the connection to the LUNs wasn't correctly disconnected that the LUNs got wiped out. First of all, who would design a storage product that did that? Second of all, that is a load of horse shit, and completely not true.
Anyway, after a few days of freaking out and actually getting ready to wipe the LUNs ourselves and restore from backup my Systems Administrator got it to work. Here is what he did:
- Make sure the iSCSI service is enabled
- Check each LUN and select Inactivate
- One by one, activate each LUN and reconnect your storage. Wait a few minutes before each successful connection.
Hopefully Buffalo Tech Support can use Google now and find this post to tell customers how to actually fix the problem instead of telling them that their data is lost.
