RE: Mirrored rootdbs chunk is down problem

Hi, Thanks for reply Rick. I didn't understand it either. I thought it should have started since it was only the mirror that was down. Or is there a special way of starting the server to tell it to ignore the mirror? Academic this issue now as we fixed it by copying the entire instance and spaces from a backup tape a couple of weeks old that had a snapshot of the entire machine - being a testing machine the data was not critical. But I'd still like to know the solution - could be valuable in the future should it ever occur on a production machine. Secondly - I see today that one of the temp spaces is now down on the same testing server - Upon inspection, I see it was not backed up to tape so never got restored - hence down (and everything related to Informix was deleted before doing the restore from tape). But even in this situation I don't understand how to get the space back online again. I try the 'onspaces....-O' option but that only works on mirrored pairs. I create an empty file by the right space name and then try to create the space - tells me it already exists. I try to drop the space - command never comes back and nothing appears to happen (..rebooted..). So, copied the file that made up another temp space of the same size to the location of the down space and renamed it to match the down space. I then tried to drop it with "onspaces -d spacename -p PathAndName -o 0" -> this gave a message "ISAM error: can not drop first chunk". So this has me a bit stuck. I'll continue perusing the manuals hoping to find something, But, in the meantime, if anyone knows a procedure to recover (or at least re-establish) a temp space (without a backup) please let me know. I would have thought it should be easy since the data of temp space is irrelevant when trying to bring it back online. But then again, nothing ever appears 'easy' to achieve with Informix :-) except breaking it - I don't even have to try to succeed with that one. Any ideas to assist me please? Regards, Bryce Stenberg. Harness Racing New Zealand computer department, emailto:bryce@hrnz.co.nz Phone: +64 3 3385099 -----Original Message----- From: Bernstein, Rick [mailto:rbernste@alarismed.com] Sent: Sunday, 3 December 2000 5:38 a.m. To: 'Bryce Stenberg'; Informix-list@IIUG. org (E-mail) Subject: RE: Mirrored rootdbs chunk is down problem Bryce, I am somewhat confused by your problem description. You indicate that a mirrored copy of a "rootdbs" chunk is "down". If so, why can't you start Informix on the primary copy? Then, you can use "onspaces -s dbspacename -p chunkpath -o chunkoffset -O -y" to recover the "down" chunk from its "online" copy. When a mirrored copy of chunk is down, you can always use "onspaces -s" to recover it from its online copy. If all copies of the "rootdbs" chunks are "down", you must restore your entire Informix instance from a backup tape. Critical dbspaces must be available for IDS 7.x to function. They contain: 1) rootdbs, 2) physical log (i.e. physdbs), 3) logical logs (i.e. logdbs) These dbspaces should always be mirrored. If you lose any of them, you must perform a "cold restore" of your entire instance. If other dbspaces are "down", you can perform a "warm restore" to recover its contents from backup tapes and logical logs. Rick -----Original Message----- From: Bryce Stenberg [mailto:bryce@hrnz.co.nz] Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 20:16 To: Informix-list@IIUG. org (E-mail) Subject: Mirrored rootdbs chunk is down problem Hi all, got another problem for all you gurus. Our testing server is NT4-SP4 running IDS7.30 TC9 workgroup edition. The disk that has our mirror of the rootdbs space ran out of disk space - this brought the mirrored chunks down (rootdbs is made up of two chunks - one 30Mb the other 170Mb). The lack of space on disk has been fixed - it now has 200 - 300Mb free space. I've searched the archives for a solution regarding getting Informix back online. The main one proffered is to use: onspaces -s dbspacename -p chunkpath -o chunkoffset -O -y However, onspaces won't run without shared memory initialised and shared memory won't initialise while the rootdbs mirrored chunk is down! Does anyone know how I can fix this please? Seems like a catch-22 situation at the moment. Maybe there is some other utility I can use or configuration I can change? I tried turning of mirroring in ONCONFIG but that had no effect :-( Thanks for any help you can offer. Regards, Bryce Stenberg. Harness Racing New Zealand computer department, emailto:bryce@hrnz.co.nz Phone: +64 3 3385099 CAUTION: This email message and accompanying data may contain information that is confidential and subject to legal privilege. If you are not the intended recipient you are notified that any use, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message or data is prohibited. 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