Cluster nodes spawn "Registry Full" notifications to the server console

In Novell Cluster Services environments we can equip the Novell NetWare servers with multiple fiber-channel cards for increased fault tolerance towards the SAN storage.

The native Novell NetWare multipath solution uses Novell's mediamanager (mm.nlm) to manage both these paths at the Operating System level.

After making modifications to the SAN infra-structure, or because of error conditions, a path-failover may take place: the currently active path is switched over to the other designated fiber channel controller and mediamanager (mm.nlm) logs the details about such a path-failover to the server's registry.
 
Not cleaning the registry from such obsoleted notifications, or having large amounts of such path-failovers, may spawn a "Registry Full" notification to the server console informing you of the problem.

A side-effect a "Registry Full" error may also lead to the inability to start additional programs that also use the affected server's registry, therefor the issue needs to be dealt with in a timely fashion. One of the programs that may exhibit load problems when encountering a full registry is "load dsrepair".

There is no need to manually edit the server registry files to remove any of the problem values in this case. For this specific scenario, there is a specific mm.nlm parameter that will clean these specific path fail-over details from the server registry.

On the server console enter the command  "mm reset failover registry".

Executing this command from the server console will result in deleting all existing failover registry entries, and will then re-populate the registry with the current settings.  This is a command that you should execute every time the SAN is reconfigured so that the old values are removed.

It is possible to verify the amount of Failover notifications that were written to the server registry, by entering "CDBE EDIT ON" on the server console, and than in good old DOS type commands you can browse through the registry using the 'cd' command and entering the appropriate registry key.

The problem keys we are looking for can be found underneath:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Novell\MediaManager]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Novell\MediaManager\Failover]

Sample values of the Failover registry keys :

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Novell\MediaManager\Failover\`060E8004((000000((000031C&8&644313]
"Priority"=dword:"00000000"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Novell\MediaManager\Failover\`060E8004((000000((000031C&7&624313]
"Priority"=dword:"00000000"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Novell\MediaManager\Failover\`060E8004((000000((0000"S&8&644313]
"Priority"=dword:"00000000"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Novell\MediaManager\Failover\`060E8004((000000((0000"S&7&624313]
"Priority"=dword:"00000000"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Novell\MediaManager\Failover\`060E8004((000000((00000C01&8&644313]
"Priority"=dword:"00000000"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Novell\MediaManager\Failover\`060E8004((000000((00000C01&7&624313]
"Priority"=dword:"00000000"

In this specific example of the registry getting full, we found approximately 1100 of the above keys that were causing the problem.