[Info-vax] Quorum disk woes

[Marc Van Dyck]

Bob Gezelter laid this down on his screen :
> On Wednesday, May 22, 2019 at 4:57:29 AM UTC-4, Marc Van Dyck wrote:
>> As explained in the previous post, I have several clusters made of two
>> members and a quorum disk.
>> 
>> From time to time - not always, but often enough to be worried - we 
>> have
>> issues when the entire cluster must be rebooted. This happens at least
>> for times a year to apply patches.
>> 
>> What sometimes happens is, when starting the first node, it gets stuck
>> at the "Waiting to form or join a VMS cluster" phase, as if the quorum
>> disk vote was not taken into account. I have to boot the second node
>> to unlock the situation. As soon as the second node joins, the quorum 
>> is
>> met and the boot sequences complete. Curiously, when both systems are
>> up, the DCL command SHOW CLUSTER displays the quorum disk as expected.
>> 
>> We've played a bit with that and understood that in this case, it is
>> enough to delete the file quorum.dat on the quorum disk. It will be
>> promptly re-created by VMS and the next boot will happen fine.
>> 
>> What I'd like to understand is
>> 
>> - What does the quorum.dat file contain ? DUMP does not display
>> anything.
>> 
>> - In which circumstances might this file become corrupt or incorrect ?
>> 
>> Thank you,
>> Marc.
>> 
>> -- 
>> Marc Van Dyck
>
> Marc,
>
> Are you sure that the quorum disk is directly accessible by the primary 
> system? What does the console display?
>
> - Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com

The quorum disk is on a SAN storage, the same as the boot disks. Most
our reboots are fine, it's only once in a while that it gets stuck.

I will try and go in the consoles archives of Cockpit to extract a
console log and will post it here.

-- 
Marc Van Dyck