I had a problem the other day, and the normally mighty Google didn’t help much, probably because the error I ran into was too obscure, so I’m describing it here in case any other poor sod runs into it.
I was directly connecting a HP DL360 G7 with a Brocade FC HBA (HP part 82B, Brocade 825) loaded with RHEL5.4 to a HP MSA2012fc, and after installing the drivers (which don’t seem to have made it into the latest HP Proliant Support Pack) started getting weird errors every few seconds:
Feb 20 12:45:02 foobar kernel: BFA[0000:09:00.0][critical] HAL_HEARTBEAT_FAILURE: Firmware heartbeat failure at 61 Feb 20 12:45:02 foobar kernel: BFA[0000:09:00.0][error] BFA_AEN_PORT_DISCONNECT: Base port (WWN = 10:00:00:05:33:48:b0:e6) lost fabric connectivity. Feb 20 12:45:02 foobar kernel: BFA[0000:09:00.0][critical] BFA_AEN_IOC_HBFAIL: Heart Beat of IOC 0 has failed. Feb 20 12:45:02 foobar kernel: BFA[0000:09:00.1][error] BFA_AEN_PORT_DISCONNECT: Base port (WWN = 10:00:00:05:33:48:b0:e7) lost fabric connectivity. Feb 20 12:45:02 foobar kernel: BFA[0000:09:00.1][critical] BFA_AEN_IOC_HBFAIL: Heart Beat of IOC 1 has failed. Feb 20 12:45:04 foobar kernel: BFA[0000:09:00.1][info] BFA_AEN_PORT_ONLINE: Base port online: WWN = 10:00:00:05:33:48:b0:e7. Feb 20 12:45:04 foobar kernel: BFA[0000:09:00.0][info] BFA_AEN_PORT_ONLINE: Base port online: WWN = 10:00:00:05:33:48:b0:e6.
Troubleshooting wasn’t helped by the fact that the hosts and storage controllers were behind a bastion SSH gateway, and much ssh tunnelling was requried to gain HTTP access to the storage controllers (they do have an SSH CLI, but I’m not overly familiar with it).
I’d remembered that later versions of the MSA default to putting their host ports into arbitrated loop mode and this hasn’t been a problem when connecting them to FC switches (although I normally do change them), but I thought it might be a problem with directly connecting an initiator. Indeed, once I managed to change the setting on the MSA to point-to-point the error messages disappeared from the linux host.