Finding the WWN in an inactive HBA in Solaris

So, Solaris comes with lots of nice tools for querying our SAN HBAs, but the ones we’ve looked at so far are only of any real use when the HBA has a live connection to it.

What about when we want to find the WWN to setup our SAN, before we’ve plugged any fibre in?

picl is a hardware monitoring daemon in Solaris. I first started playing with it on mid-frame and high-end machines (SF6500s and F15ks) where the system controller (SC) talked to picl to do hardware monitoring of a Solaris domain.

We can talk to picl ourselves with prtpicl. We need the verbose option to get something useful, but be warned – this will dump out pages and pages of stuff – so we need to filter it a bit with grep.

root@avalon>prtpicl -v | grep wwn
              :node-wwn  20  00  00  e0  8b  1e  a9  ef 
              :port-wwn  21  00  00  e0  8b  1e  a9  ef 
              :node-wwn  20  00  00  e0  8b  3e  a9  ef 
              :port-wwn  21  01  00  e0  8b  3e  a9  ef 
              :node-wwn  20  00  00  e0  8b  80  9c  a8 
              :port-wwn  21  00  00  e0  8b  80  9c  a8 
              :node-wwn  20  00  00  e0  8b  a0  9c  a8 
              :port-wwn  21  01  00  e0  8b  a0  9c  a8 
              :node-wwn  20  00  00  03  ba  db  e9  89 
              :port-wwn  21  00  00  03  ba  db  e9  89 
                      :node-wwn  20  00  00  00  87  83  fd  1c 
                      :port-wwn  21  00  00  00  87  83  fd  1c 
                      :node-wwn  20  00  00  00  87  84  4a  d8 
                      :port-wwn  21  00  00  00  87  84  4a  d8 

These are the node WWNs that we’re after, with the first one being c2, the second c3, and so on. The internal controller is last, and we can see the WWNs of the two FC disks that are hanging off it. (Remember, on a V490 we have internal FC-AL disks, not SCSI).

Finally, for our last trick, if we have Solaris 10 01/06 or later, we can use the awesome fcinfo command, which makes all of this very, very easy indeed.

root@avalon # fcinfo hba-port
HBA Port WWN: 210000e08b1ea9ef
        OS Device Name: /dev/cfg/c2
        Manufacturer: QLogic Corp.
        Model: QLE2460
        Type: unknown
        State: offline
        Supported Speeds: 1Gb 2Gb 4Gb 
        Current Speed: not established 
        Node WWN: 200000e08b1ea9ef

Easy! Another good reason for upgrading to Solaris 10 – there are lots of nice tools and new features like this that make the day to day administration much easier.