IBM AIX 7.3 – Common Problem 228 – Diagnosis and Fix

📖 ~1 min read

Table of contents

1. Symptom & Impact
2. Environment & Reproduction
3. Root Cause Analysis
4. Quick Triage
5. Step-by-Step Diagnosis
6. Solution – Primary Fix
7. Solution – Alternative Approaches
8. Verification & Acceptance Criteria
9. Rollback Plan
10. Prevention & Hardening
11. Related Errors & Cross-Refs
12. References & Further Reading

Symptom & Impact

lsvg -l shows stale PPs and applications report intermittent read errors.

Environment & Reproduction

Follows a transient disk or SAN path outage in a mirrored VG.

Root Cause Analysis

AIX LVM marks PPs stale when a write could not reach all mirror copies during the outage.

Quick Triage

Run lsvg -l vgname and look for non-zero STALE PPs.

Step-by-Step Diagnosis

Use lspv -l hdiskN and lqueryvg -Atp hdiskN to map stale PPs to LVs.

Solution – Primary Fix

Resync the VG with syncvg -v vgname or syncvg -l lvname for targeted LVs.

Solution – Alternative Approaches

If a mirror is permanently lost, use rmlvcopy then mklvcopy on a healthy disk and resync.

Verification & Acceptance Criteria

lsvg -l vgname reports STALE PPs at 0 and applications no longer see read errors.

Rollback Plan

Abort syncvg with Ctrl-C and varyoffvg/varyonvg the VG if resync destabilizes the system.

Prevention & Hardening

Run scheduled syncvg checks and monitor lspath for Missing paths to avoid silent staleness.

Related Errors & Cross-Refs

Frequently follows hdisk PERM errors and JFS2 EIO failures.

Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for aix-7.3.

View all aix-7.3 tutorials on the Tutorials Hub →

Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.

References & Further Reading

IBM AIX 7.3 LVM administration guide – syncvg and mirror recovery.