I'm working on a backup server using Ubuntu 20.04, and I just added a new SAS enclosure. The existing enclosures are recognized by multipath, so I expected the new one to be picked up as well. I've confirmed that both connection paths to the new drives are active, and they appear as two entries in lsblk. However, when I run various multipath commands like `multipath`, `multipath -F`, and `multipath -ll`, the new drives aren't being mapped to multipath devices. I checked multiple paths and entries in /sys/class/enclosure and confirmed they're connected, but they just show up by size in `multipath -v3`. Also, in Dell Server Hardware Manager, these drives don't show a vendor, which might suggest multipath is ignoring them. Is there something I could change in the configurations or settings to get these drives recognized?
1 Answer
It sounds like the lack of vendor information is the root of your issue. Multipath relies on being able to properly identify devices to create the appropriate mappings. Check your `multipath.conf` file and see if there's a specific policy set—if it’s expecting certain vendor data, it won't merge paths properly if it can't identify those vendors. Also, you might want to see if you can classify the devices using alternate attributes like 'product'. That might help them get recognized.
That's a solid point! I'm curious about how those devices ended up without vendor info. Are they configured properly in the enclosure? Could there be an issue with the firmware?