Installation Issues and Solutions

This section describes known installation and initial configuration issues and how you can respond to them. For information about problems that are related to validating the installation, see Installation Validation Issues and Solutions.

No VLAN-capable gigabit Ethernet card was found during the installation procedure. If the installer does not find any VLAN-capable card or appropriate drivers on the system, the following message is displayed:

Could not detect any known gigacards. Check if your driver packages are installed.

This problem might occur due to several reasons:

• A supported VLAN-capable gigabit Ethernet card has not been installed on the N1 Provisioning Server system. The N1 Provisioning Server software requires that one of the following two supported network cards is installed with the specified driver:

  • SysKonnect SK98xx: 64-bit driver version 6.02

  • GigaSwift: Solaris 8 drivers requires patch 112119-04.

  Make sure that the supported version of the driver is installed in the N1 Provisioning Server.

• The driver for the card might not be installed properly. Make sure that the correct version of the network card driver is installed. Also, verify that the driver packages for the GigaSwift card have been installed to enable VLAN capabilities.

• The card is not installed as instance 0. The N1 Provisioning Server software expects the VLAN-capable gigabit Ethernet card to be installed as instance 0. To verify this setting, look in the /etc/path_to_inst file for ce or skge. If the network card has been assigned a different instance number, you will need to reconfigure the server. To reconfigure the server for a different instance number, follow these steps:

  1. Identify all instances that match the same device:

     "/pci@8,700000/pci@3/network@0" 0 "ce" grep "/pci@8,700000/pci@3/network@0" /etc/path_to_inst

  2. Remove all entries that were identified in the previous step from the/etc/path_to_inst file.

  3. Use the following command to reboot the N1 Provisioning Server system:

     # reboot -- -r

  4. After the reboot, verify that the ce or skge instance has been set to 0.

During the installation process, you see a message that not all required patches have been installed.

The required operating system patches need to be installed before installation can proceed. The N1 Provisioning Server 3.1, Blades Edition release allows you to install the Solaris 8 Recommended patch cluster, rather than to install individually the required patches mentioned in the installation guide. For more information about installing required patches, see Installing Required Patches in N1 Provisioning Server 3.1, Blades Edition, Installation Guide.

After applying operating system patches to the N1 Provisioning Server system, named/dhcp does not start up properly. One indication of this problem is that farm requests start failing.

The applied patches probably overwrote one of the N1 modified system tools like BIND or DHCP. Try the following solutions:

• Identify the patches that overwrote the N1 modified version of the tools. Currently, N1 only replaces BIND and DHCP related files. Once you have identified the list of patches that patched these system tools, remove those patches using the patchrm utility.

• Reinstall the following two packages:

  • TSPRdns

  • TSPRdhcp

  The package files can be found on the product media in the Solaris/Terraspring/3.1/Product path.

Installation of the Sun Java^TM System Application Server failed. The installation log file (/var/opt/terraspring/install/run/install.log) contains the specific error message.

This problem is most likely due to a missing patch on the N1 Provisioning Server system. Make sure that you have all required patches installed on the N1 Provisioning Server system.

When entering the Blade system chassis IP address and switch network configuration information, the chassis cannot be found. The following error message appears:

Cannot ping System Controller IP Value ip-address

This problem is due to a networking issue. If you have not done so, you need to configure the Blade system chassis system controller (SC) to be IP-accessible from the N1 Provisioning Server. For more information, see Assigning IP Addresses in the Control Plane in N1 Provisioning Server 3.1, Blades Edition, Installation Guide.

Configuration of the chassis failed. The installation log file (/var/opt/terraspring/install/run/install.log) contains the specific error message. The installer displays the following message, along with a series of options from which you can choose:

Installation may have failed due to incorrect user input or some other correctable error.

When the installer fails to configure a chassis SC or switch, several items need to be verified:

• Verify that the chassis SC is responding properly and does not hang. Execute showplatform -v from the SC prompt and verify that the output is printed to the screen without significant delay, such as greater than one minute.

• Verify that the login parameters provided to the installer match the user name and password configured on the chassis and switch.

• Verify that the chassis SC is network accessible using the IP address provided to the installer.

Chassis discovery fails. The installation log file (/var/opt/terraspring/install/run/install.log) contains the specific error message. The installer displays the following message, along with a series of options from which you can choose:

Installation may have failed due to incorrect user input or some other correctable error.

Verify that the shelf controller's CLI prompt generation property is set to none and that the prompt ends with a > character.

During the installation process, creating the Control Center database fails. The installation log file (/var/opt/terraspring/install/run/install.log) contains the specific error message. The installer displays the following message, along with a series of options from which you can choose:

Installation may have failed due to incorrect user input or some other correctable error.

If you are using Oracle for your database system, the installer needs to know the user name and password of an Oracle dba account so that it can create the Control Center database. If this information is not provided to the installer correctly, or if the default system/manager account does not exist, creation of the CC database will fail.

If the creation of the database fails, you will need to either update the Oracle database to contain the proper user name and password combination or update the installer parameters by entering a new set of user name and password.

You see an error indicating a problem loading the configuration on the switch.

If you ran the switchsync tool on a new shelf system controller (SSC) that replaces a low activity SSC, you can safely ignore this message. The switchsync tool is meant to be used when an SSC that malfunctioned while in use or had some other problem is being replaced by another SSC. However, if there is not enough activity on the Provisioning Server, such as farm activation, to alter the configuration of the switch, this tool need not be run on the new SSC that replaces the old one. If you attempt to run this tool, you might see an error that there was some problem loading the configuration on the switch. The error occurs because not enough information is in the database about the configuration of the switch because no switch-related activity occurred.

Installation failed, and you would like to start over.

The N1 Provisioning Server software includes an uninstall program. Run the uninstall_PS command to uninstall a partially installed server.