Qlogic 2432, Multipath, Dynamic LUNs, and NTFS

[Greg H.]

Hello All,

I've just installed a new HP BladeSystem with BL460c blades, connected via 
dual on-board Qlogic 2432 Fibre Channel controllers, to an EVA4000 SAN.  After 
getting the isp driver from 6.2-Stable, everything runs very smoothly.

Now, I've been asked to use our very stable FreeBSD blades to backup the often 
flakey Windows 2003 Server drives.  Both the FreeBSD blades and the Windows 
blades have their own LUNs on the EVA4000 SAN.

To do this, I've created a snapshot of one of the non-compressed NTFS drives 
on the EVA, and presented it to the FreeBSD system, dynamically.  After 
doing a camcontrol rescan all, both a camcontrol devlist, or an ls /dev/ntfs 
crash the system.  Because of the silly HP blade environment, I don't have 
access to the console during the crashes.  I also haven't found any signs 
in the logs.  

Here is an additional quirk.  When the system comes back up, the snapshot LUN 
show up, and seems to mount properly with mount -t ntfs.  I can't get ntfs-3g 
to work properly when loaded as a package, and the port won't compile.

The strange thing is that an ls of the NTFS snapshot shows a file that 
is 7,653,312,512 bytes, but cat | bzip2 (and dd) only reads 3,358,345,216 bytes.
Reading a larger file of 50,135,415,808 bytes crashes the system.

These are the files from the SAN snapshot of the NTFS drive:
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   7653312512 Jun 26 20:31 MV-C.bkf
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  50135415808 Jun 26 21:28 MV-E.bkf
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    575225856 Jun 26 20:12 MV-SysState.bkf

Here's what happens when I try to read them:
Copying MV-SysState.bkf 
Wed Jun 27 17:58:00 PDT 2007
(stdin):  2.792:1,  2.866 bits/byte, 64.18% saved, 575225856 in, 206056048 out
 
Copying MV-C.bkf 
Wed Jun 27 18:01:08 PDT 2007
(stdin):  4.047:1,  1.977 bits/byte, 75.29% saved, 3358345216 in, 829840937 out
 
Copying MV-E.bkf 
Wed Jun 27 18:19:34 PDT 2007
(stdin): <insert crash here>

If this is the wrong list, I'll happily send it to the proper list if someone 
tells me what it is.

Other interesting facts are that each LUN presented by the SAN appears 4 times, 
once on each FC port (as was expected), and GEOM seems to handle it just fine.
Mounts reference the GEOM label such as /dev/ufs/mail2root or /dev/ntfs/MV-Backup.

Any suggestions of how to dynamically mount/unmount FC LUNs, and faithfully 
read files from an NTFS file system?

Thanks everybody,

Greg H.



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