Removal of a Board

The removal of a board requires the devices attached to the board be prepared, followed by the unconfiguration and disconnection of the board, as described below.

For the removal procedure, see "Removing a Board".

Preparing I/O and Network Devices

A board with vital system resources cannot be detached unless alternate resources are available on another board. A boot disk is an example of a vital system resource.

A board hosting non-vital system resources can be unconfigured whether or not there are alternate paths to the resources. All of its file systems must be unmounted and its swap partitions must be deleted. You may have to kill processes that have open files or devices, or place a hard lock on the file systems (using lockfs(1M)) before unmounting them. All I/O device drivers must be detachable.

The system swap space should be configured as multiple partitions on disks attached to controllers hosted by different boards. With this kind of configuration, a particular swap partition is not a vital resource because swap partitions can be added and deleted dynamically. See swap(1M) for more information.

When memory or disk swap space is detached, there must be enough memory or swap disk space remaining in the machine to accommodate currently running programs.

I/O Board Unconfiguration

The screen, mouse, and keyboard will not be operational while the system is suspended, but you will regain control of these devices after the suspension.

Preparation of an I/O Board for Removal

Before the Unconfigure operation can be completed, you must manually terminate usage of all I/O devices on the board, including network interfaces.

To identify the components that are on the board to be unconfigured, use the ifconfig, mount, pf, or swap commands. The prtdiag(1M) command provides some information, but is less informative.

Termination of Network Devices

DR does not automatically terminate use of all network interfaces on the board that is being disconnected. You must manually terminate the use of each interface.

DR does not allow an Unconfigure operation on any interface that fits the following conditions. In these cases, the Unconfigure operation fails and DR displays an error message.

• The network interface is the primary network interface for the machine. That is, the IP address of the interface corresponds to the network interface name contained in the file /etc/nodename. Halting the primary network interface for the machine prevents network information name services from operating, which results in the inability to make network connections to remote hosts using applications such as ftp(1), rsh(1), rcp(1), rlogin(1). NFS client and server operations are also affected.

• The active alternate for an Alternate Pathing (AP) meta device when the AP meta device is plumbed. Interfaces used by the AP system should not be the active path when the board is being unconfigured. Manually switch the active path to one that is not on the board being unconfigured. If no such path exists, manually execute the ifconfig down and ifconfig unplumb commands on the AP interface. (To manually switch an active path, use the apconfig(1M) command.)