Manually Activating Shared SAN Device Volumes

I'd like to follow up on my previous post on configuring OES 1 for a 2-node failover cluster. I did not mention that the patch to the system included a function called activate_evms_container. This bash function is part of the script /opt/novell/ncs/lib/ncsfuncs

Of course this script is invoked automatically when the service is failed over to another node, but if you had to manually move the storage for (in this case) iPrint, you could invoke this script manually. After running the script, aside from the activate_evms_container function made available, there is another function deport_evms_container that helps in bringing down the service. What these two functions do essentially is to make the device for the SAN storage available.

For example, when I wanted to mount the storage manually, I will first run the script to make the function available. Note that this script needs only to run once for each terminal session.

. /opt/novell/ncs/lib/ncsfuncs

Then before I activate the device, I first ensure that it is not currently active in any other node. When that is done, I'll invoke the following commands to activate the device and mount its file system.

activate_evms_container cont_iprint /dev/evms/cont_iprint/volume
mount -t reiserfs /dev/evms/cont_iprint/volume /mnt/

When I'm done, I unmount the file system and 'deactivate' the device.

umount /mnt deport_evms_container cont_iprint