Release Notes for STM on HP-UX 11.00 (March 2000)

• Overview
• Documentation
• Changes
  • Changes to User Interface and Platform
  • General Changes to Tools
  • Changes to Specific Tools
• Known Problems
• Defect Reporting
• SD Product Structure

These release notes cover the March 2000 (IPR 0003) release of Support Plus for HP-UX 11.00 running on S800/S700 systems.

NOTE: As of the September 1999 release, the name of the Diagnostic/IPR Media has been changed to Support Plus. In addition, the format has changed so that there is a separate CD-ROM for each version of the operating system (HP-UX 10.20 and HP-UX 11.0).

Overview

The Support Tools Manager (STM) provides a complete set of online support tools for HP-UX systems, enabling you to verify and troubleshoot PA-RISC system hardware, and to examine system logs.

STM offers several tool types, including information tools, verifiers, exercisers, expert tools, firmware update tools, diagnostics and utilities.

Installed with STM (as of IPR 9902) are the EMS Hardware Monitors, an important tool for maintaining system availability. The EMS hardware monitors allow you to monitor the operation of a wide variety of hardware products and be alerted immediately if any failure or other unusual event occurs. For more information, see /usr/sbin/stm/Rel_NOTES.HWE.

Documentation

For the latest and most complete information on STM and EMS Hardware Event Monitors, see the Web page "Diagnostics":

  http://docs.hp.com/hpux/diag/

At this site, you will find Overviews, Tutorials, Quick Reference Cards, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), and much other material.

Changes

The online Support Tools Manager (STM) was enhanced and updated for the current release.

Changes to User Interface and Platform

• Changed the user interface and diagmond so that users without superuser permission will no longer be allowed to start and shut down the diagnostic daemons.
• Fixed a problem that could occur during startup of the STM user interface (UI). Formerly, when attempting to start all the information tools on a system with many CPUs, the UI would sometimes get an error indicating that it could not start a tool because there was already a tool active on that hardware path. The UI would not start the rest of the tools on the rest of the hardware paths when it got this error. This problem occurred when one of the tools to be started (such as the memory information tool, the cpu exerciser, etc.) attempted to get access to more hardware paths on the system than the one on which it was started. The UI was modified so that no longer considers the situation to be a fatal error when it tries to start a tool on a hardware path on which another tool is already active. Now it will just skip that hardware path and continue attempting to start the rest of the tools requested.
• Changed name of STM command from "Matching Device Type" to "Matching Devices". The command now matches only those devices with the same device type and device qualifier. The old cstm command was "SelDevTyp" or "SDT". The new command is "SelDev", or "SD". The old command was only present in release IPR 9912 (STM version A.19.00,) which was the initial release which supported map filtering.
• Fixed a problem with the logging done by the memlogd daemon. Previously on older computer systems that do not support Memory Page Deallocation, the memlogd daemon would log the following message to the memlogd activity log at regular intervals:

  Wed Dec 22 17:39:32 1999:  get_new_error_list:  An unexpected
  error was encountered when the Memlogd daemon was trying to
  perform the Hardware Event Notification.
  
  Possible Causes/Recommended Action:
  Internal Application error.
  

  With this release of STM, these messages are no longer logged.

General Changes to Tools

• Enhanced tools for SCSI devices to improve error reporting. SCSI tools use the tlscsidev library which will now identify the failing routine and error number value upon encountering a system call failure. The information will be logged into the test activity log of the tool making the reference.
• Fixed problem on tools that decode memory addresses for T-Class. Formerly, if a T-Class contained an 8-GB memory board (codename "Colossus") with more than 4-GB of memory, memory addresses with errors would not be decoded to the proper memory module location. Instead, the operation would be reported as failed. With this release of STM, the memory addresses will be properly decoded.
• Enhanced tools that deal with MO drive firmware (change to tool library). Made firmware revision checking for MO drives more robust. Incremented latest firmware revision numbers for MO drives and autochangers to see if latest firmware is loaded.
• Fixed a problem with tools that attempt to read/write pages in physical memory. In particular, this problem could have occurred with the memlogd daemon and the memory expert tool when they tried to read or write an address with a "1" in the high order bit (MSB) of an integer variable. The memory expert tool would log an error into its activity log similar to the following:

  Wed Dec 22 17:39:32 1999: A failure in the seek to page
  530161 occurred, the read request did not complete.
  Errno (234) was returned by the lseek() system call.
  This errno is unexpected.
  
  Possible Cause(s)/Recommended Action(s):
  Internal application error.
       
  

Changes to Specific Tools

• Information tools:
  • Enhanced the CPU information tool for Hitachi's Mammoth++ system, so that the processor CPU ID field is also displayed.
  • Fixed a problem on the CPU information tool for T-Class. With recent versions of HP-UX 11.0, the information tool displayed "N/A" for the CPU slot field on T-Class systems. With this fix, the correct slot number for the CPU will be displayed.
  • Added support for HP C5683A (DDS-4) tape drive.
  • Added support for the A5158A card (FC Interface card using Tachlite chip)
  • Fixed a problem, so that information for the HP 3740A card (PCI Tachyon card) is now properly displayed.
  • Fixed a problem with the memory information tool for K-Class, D-Class, some J-Class, etc. (V-Class, N-Class, and T-Class are not affected.) In mid-1999, there was a change in the manufacture of memory cards for the affected systems, whereby a new DIMM replaced the original DIMM. The new DIMM is a 1/2-loaded 2X DIMM and the original DIMM was a fully loaded 1X DIMM. On systems that contain these recently manufactured DIMMs, previous versions of the memory tool displayed incorrect information for the new DIMMs. With this version of STM, the memory tool will display the correct information for both the new and original DIMMs.
  • Fixed a problem with the PCI information tool for the PCI Fibre Channel Driver Card on some N-Class systems, whereby the status for the tool would incorrectly be given as "Incomplete".
• Exerciser tools:
  • N/A
• Verifier tools:
  • N/A
• Diagnose tools:
  • Added support for HP C5683A (DDS-4) Tape Drive and HP C6280-8000 (Model 818) Tape Autoloader.
  • Add support for the A5158A-A Tachyon-TL Fibre Channel Mass Storage Adapter. The diagnose tool will do an external loopback test on the FCMS adapter and tell the user if it was successful or not. Also added support for Tachyon FCMS PCI systems.
• Firmware update tools:
  • Added support for HP C5683A (DDS-4) tape drive, HP C5713A (DDS-4) autoloader and A5617A (model L180) autoloader.
• Expert tools:
  • Added support for HP C5683A (DDS-4) tape drive. HP C5683A (DDS-4) tape drive , A5617A (model L180) tape autoloader, and HP C6280-8000 (Model 818) tape autoloader.
  • Fixed a problem with tools that attempt to read/write pages in physical memory. In particular, this problem could have occurred with the memlogd daemon and the memory expert tool when they tried to read or write an address with a "1" in the high order bit (MSB) of an integer variable. The memory expert tool would log an error into its activity log similar to the following:

    Wed Dec 22 17:39:32 1999: A failure in the seek to page
    530161 occurred, the read request did not complete.
    Errno (234) was returned by the lseek() system call.
    This errno is unexpected.
    
    Possible Cause(s)/Recommended Action(s):
    Internal application error.
         
    

  • Fixed problem with memory expert tool on T600 systems with a fully loaded 8-GB ("Colossus") memory board, whereby a failure occurred when doing a translation from a memory address to physical location.
• Logtool:
  • Added support for the A5158A-A Tachyon-TL Fibre Channel Mass Storage Adapter.
  • Enhancement to the chassis code decoder. The chassis code decoder is executed through logtool: Chassis-> View Boot Log or Chassis-> View Error Log. The change for this release affects only Chassis->View Boot Log. The format of the boot log now resembles the format of the chassis logs as displayed by SAS during system bootup. This is more of a forward progress type of report. The format is as follows: The source and caller activity fields of the chassis code are displayed in text followed by 4 hex digits. The first digit is the reporting entity, the second digit is the caller activity, the third and fourth digits represent the caller sub-activity. At the top of the log file is a timestamp of when the first chassis code was recorded during boot time. Example:

    Timestamp : 11/22/1999  00:01:36
    platform entity config 026F
    processor slave rendezvous 0C17
    processor test 0142
    processor test 0100
    .
    .
    .
    

    If a chassis code contains an alert level >= 6, then the entire chassis code is decoded and displayed, along with a text message that describes the problem.

Known Problems

: Monitoring Changes for disc30, sdisk and disk array devices

As of IPR 9902 (Feb 99 release), there has been a change to the way that monitoring is done for disc30, sdisk and the HA Disk Array Models 10, 20, and 30FC.

Formerly, the "diaglogd exec" programs (pdisc30_exec, pharaymon_exec, and psdisk_exec) handled driver error entries for these devices.

As of IPR 9902, these programs have been deleted and their functionality is now provided by the EMS Hardware Monitors.

If you had customized the configuration files for the dialogd exec programs (disk30_exec.cfg, sdisk_exec.cfg, and haraymon_exec.cfg) you may wish to re-configure the EMS Hardware Monitors to achieve the same results.

Defect Reporting

Use CHART to report defects in STM. The project name is diag.stm.tools.hpux for individual tools, and diag.stm.ui.hpux for the user interface. If you don't have access to CHART, contact an HP representative to enter a defect for you.

SD Product Structure

The product number for STM is B4708AA.

SD PRODUCT: Sup-Tool-Mgr
   Description: On-line Diagnostic System (Series 800/700)

   SD SUB-PRODUCT: Manuals
   Description: Support Tools Manager Manual Pages

      FILESET: STM-MAN
         Description: S800/S700 STM Manual Pages

      FILESET: STM-SHLIBS
         Description: S800/S700 STM Shared Libraries

      FILESET: STM-UI-RUN Corequisite Filesets: STM-SHLIBS
         Description: S800/S700 STM User Interface
         
      FILESET: STM-UUT-RUN  Corequisite Filesets: STM-SHLIBS
         Description: S800/700 STM Unit Under Test Runtime 

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