avr 29 2011

Hit by multipath bug.

Tag: UnixUggla @ 11 h 58 min

Short article to keep a note about this bug.
We (colleague and I) added a lun to a RHEL 5.4 and configured it with multipath.
Everything was fine until we rebooted. We were stuck at early boot up stage with :

Cannot make directory [/var/lib] : Read-only file system

Looking for some ideas regarding this bug we finally found this RH identified bug : https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=409741
Issue is exactly the one describe in comment #11 by Blaz Podrzaj.

To fix it :

  1. we move /var/lib/multipath/bindings to /etc/multipath/bindings.
  2. edit /etc/multipath.conf and add the directive bindings_file           /etc/multipath/bindings in the defaults section.

This is a bit different from the solution provided by Blaz Podrzaj comments but we prefer not to have symlinks.
To my mind, having various solutions to fix an issue is something that makes linux really « fun ».