Sometimes in AIX / VIOS you will have one (or more) Fibre Ports that will complain about a Link Failure. AIX/VIOS may record these as an error: 29FA8C20 or 7BFEEA1F.
These errors can appear in the case of a configured fibre port adapter OR in the case of an unconfigured one. Typically if it is an already configured port, then you are having some hardware issues with it which will require troubleshooting. Things to check would be:
- Fibre Cable connected on both ends (SAN Switch and IBM Power server)
- SAN port is enabled
- GBIC is fully inserted
You could have a bad adapter, bad gbic, faulty fibre cable or an unconfigured port (or bad port) on the SAN switch side. A Loopback Fibre Adapter can be utilized here for use with the AIX diagnostic utility (smitty diag). If you are removing cables, gbics etc, ensure in the OS that you run another cfgdev/cfgmgr to scan the bus for changes.
Unconfigured port flagging errors
If you have never setup the fibre adapter port (and in some cases, a fibre cable isn’t even connected) it may still flag those errors. This will cause numerous errors to be written to the error log. The steps below will show how to stop the system from looking for that hba port any longer, in essence quietting the error log.
For this example, we’ll assume the problem child is the first hba port fcs0.
First, you’ll want to remove the problematic device.
# rmdev -dev fcs0 -recursive -ucfg ## For vios
# rmdev -l fcs0 -R ## for AIX
Configure device so that it does NOT try to autoconfigure again.
# chdev -dev fscsi0 -attr autoconfig=defined ## for VIOS
# chdev -l fscsi0 -a autoconfig=defined ## for AIX
If things change in the future, and you need to start using this fibre port, you can set it back to auto-configure with:
# chdev -dev fscsi0 -attr autoconfig=available ## for VIOS
# chdev -l fscsi0 -a autoconfig=available ## for AIX
Run a bus scan to confirm:
# cfgdev ## for VIOS
# cfgmgr ## for AIX