Oracle ASM Disk Name Lenght Limit

Question

Hi,
Does anyone know wheter or not oracleasm has a maximum disk name lenght limit, I have a situation where "#oracleasm listdisks" shows the same name for 5 of my disks and seems to have truncated the last character from the disk name.
So, now my ASM Diskgroup is not starting up because it sees that there are "missing" disks, but they are not missing, they are just listed with the same Disk Name.
Commands used to create the disks:
oracleasm createdisk RAC_DATA146_500GB_DISK001 /dev/emcpowerek1
oracleasm createdisk RAC_DATA146_500GB_DISK002 /dev/emcpowerem1
oracleasm createdisk RAC_DATA146_500GB_DISK003 /dev/emcpowerej1
oracleasm createdisk RAC_DATA146_500GB_DISK004 /dev/emcpowerel1
oracleasm createdisk RAC_DATA146_500GB_DISK005 /dev/emcpowerei1
Now, see the output when I do a querydisk:
[root@birac01 ~]# oracleasm querydisk /dev/emcpowerek1
Disk "/dev/emcpowerek1" is marked an ASM disk with the label "RAC_DATA146_500GB_DISK00"
[root@birac01 ~]# oracleasm querydisk /dev/emcpowerem1
Disk "/dev/emcpowerem1" is marked an ASM disk with the label "RAC_DATA146_500GB_DISK00"
[root@birac01 ~]# oracleasm querydisk /dev/emcpowerej1
Disk "/dev/emcpowerej1" is marked an ASM disk with the label "RAC_DATA146_500GB_DISK00"
[root@birac01 ~]# oracleasm querydisk /dev/emcpowerel1
Disk "/dev/emcpowerel1" is marked an ASM disk with the label "RAC_DATA146_500GB_DISK00"
[root@birac01 ~]# oracleasm querydisk /dev/emcpowerei1
Disk "/dev/emcpowerei1" is marked an ASM disk with the label "RAC_DATA146_500GB_DISK00"
So, it looks like the version of oracleasm that I'm running has a name lenght limit? IS this possible?
[root@birac01 ~]# rpm -qa | grep oracleasm
oracleasm-support-2.0.3-1
oracleasm-2.6.9-55.ELsmp-2.0.3-1
oracleasmlib-2.0.2-1
Can anyone please help?
Regards
Stephan
Edited by: user1675141 on Mar 22, 2011 2:10 AM

Answer 1

Oracleasmlib does not seem to advertise such information. As such it might be a poor design that it is not verifiying user input.
According to http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E11882_01/install.112/e17212/storage.htm#CWLIN294
+"The disk names that you specify can contain uppercase letters, numbers, and the underscore character. They must start with an uppercase letter."+
The Oracle ASM assistant documentation shows:
+"A volume name of Oracle ASM can be a maximum of 11 alphanumeric characters; dashes are not allowed. The first character must be alphabetic"+
Why are you using such long volume and device names in first place? I would abbreviate the names and make them shorter. The url above will also show you information about configuring multipath and udev.
You could try to query device names using:
/etc/init.d/oracleasm querydisk -p VOL1
and rename volumes using:
/etc/init.d/oracleasm renamedisk /dev/sdb1 VOL1
Edited by: Dude on Mar 22, 2011 5:19 AM