[linux-lvm] Disappearing Volume Group

[Nick Couchman]

I'm having an issue with LVM2 right now that has me a little worried.  I
have a system set up with a few RAID arrays attached via FC.  Because
there are multiple paths, I've configured one of these RAID arrays via
multipathd.  I set it up, configured it with multipath (it shows up
under /dev/dm-18) and then used pvcreate to "mark" it as an LVM2 device.
I then used vgcreate to create a volume group (called "raid50") using
this pv as the only device in the volume group.  This worked quite well
for quite a while, until I deleted a LVM volume in a *different* volume
group and now the raid50 volume group has disappeared.  It gets stranger
because the two volumes that are active on this volume group were
exported with iSCSI and are still available.  The devices entires
in /dev/mapper and links in /dev/raid50 are still there and still appear
to be working.  However, none of the LVM2 commands will show this volume
group or its member volumes.  This has me a little worried as to what
the result is going to be when I reboot the system, restart multipath,
etc.

So, I'm wondering if anyone has any diagnostic or recovery steps they
can walk me through to diagnose why this has happened, what I might be
able to do to recover it (without a reboot - this is a production iSCSI
target server), and whether I'm going to see the volumes next time I
reboot.  Here's some information on versions of software, etc., I have
running:

- rPath Linux (it's actually the Openfiler 2.2 appliance)
- Kernel Version: 2.6.19.7-0.1.x86.i686.cmov
- LVM Version Info:
  LVM version:     2.02.09 (2006-08-17)
  Library version: 1.02.09 (2006-08-15)
  Driver version:  4.10.0
- Multipath Version: 0.4.7

I'd greatly appreciate any hints or advice in the matter.

Thanks,
Nick



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