Thanks to all who replied. Turns out that the errors the user dredged up
are quite old, and so this probably is a non-issue. I rec'd several
enlightening
replies, though, so I'm summarizing here. The reason the contents of
/var/adm/messages weren't in the errorlog was that the messages were a
year old, so they'd be deeply buried in the errorlog!
Several people indicated that SCSI CAM errors point to either a hardware
problem or the need for a firmware update.
--------------------------------------------------------
Serguei Patchkovskii said the following, which doesn't apply to our system, but
is interesting and may be useful to someone:
"I'd guess you installed a non-Compaq SCSI controller based on Qlogic ISP
in your system, right? If you do this, you'll have to put ISP firmware in
/dev/qlogic/isp_fw.mod (or whatever place 'sysconfig -q isp' wants it to be).
Check out the archives of this list for the instructions on obtaining the
firmware."
--------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Blinn said:
"Kernel error messages are almost exclusively logged to /var/adm/messages
while most "application" or daemon messages wind up eventually in one of
the logs in syslog.dated.
There are no messages in the binary error log because no device driver or
adapter driver logged them.
The "isp" driver depends on the console firmware to initialize the firmware
in the "ISP" devices (typically Qlogic ISP10x0 or ISP20x0 chips). Either
you have outdated console firmware, or the option card isn't compatible
and the console chose not to load the firmware. From the perspective of
your UNIX operating system, the PCI option data for the card found in the
pci1 slot 0 bus LOOKED like it might be a supported option, but UNIX does
not "carry" a firmware for these cards, or load it into the cards, and if
the console didn't load the firmware (or it's otherwise nonfunctional),
the card isn't going to work."
----------------------------------------------------------
alan_at_nabeth.cxo.dec.com said:
"When the system boots it tries to find all the adapters
listed in the configuration file. This process is the
"probe". It would appear that it tried to probe an
"isp" device and failed. The ISP family controllers
are the KZPDA and KZPBA (Q-logic based SCSI adapters).
The "cam_logger" messages are from the SCSI driver
and suggest a problem with SCSI bus 3, which is
probably the same SCSI adapter that couldn't be
probed. You could have a badly configured device
or a broken device. I believe such adapters get
their firmware from the console.
The CAM errors may get turned into error log entries
as well as some of the ASCII messages, but this occurs
very early in the boot and it possible that some of
the messages are missed. However, you shouldn't be
looking in the syslog files for these messages, since
they'll be in the binary error log (/var/adm/binary.errlog).
You can format the error log with DECevent (the dia command)
or uerf(8). DECevent is the better choice.
The syslog files are generally used for application error
logging, not kernel logging."
-----------------------------------------------------------
Thanks again to all who replied.
--
Judith Reed
jreed_at_appliedtheory.com
(315) 453-2912 x335
Received on Thu Feb 17 2000 - 19:03:31 NZDT