NSS pool move operation displays Error 23316 "No Space for Move Stamps"

  • 7012837
  • 12-Jul-2013
  • 17-Sep-2018

Environment

Novell Open Enterprise Server 11 (OES 11) Linux
Novell Cluster Services

Situation

A customer is using NSSMU to move NSS pools from one SAN to another SAN.

This is working well for most NSS pools, however after specifying the new pool size on the remote SAN, and pressing F3 to accept the new values, some of the NSS pools fail to move with error "23316 - No Space for Move Stamps".

Resolution

The existing NSS pool on the old SAN that was intended to be moved to the new location, had to be expanded with a minimum of 12 MB, for the process to succeed.

Cause

Typically, when creating a NSS pool, a partition is created on a 1MB boundary and NSS uses 32 sectors for a header to store stamps, and provides the rest to NSS pools. NSS will then round the pools to a 1MB boundary.  What this does is leave a 1MB (32 sectors space at the end of the partition that is not used. 

The NSS 'pool move' code takes advantage of that unused space to store the mirror stamps that are being used for the actual pool move. 

When this space is available, a pool move can successfully be performed.
There is however always a possibility that the pool is using all the space for one reason or another.  These could be pools that were originally created on earlier version of Novell NetWare. 

NSS checks to make sure the space required is available (NSS needs 6 sectors to store the stamps), and if not, will return the reported error.  There is nothing that can be done with the pool as to fix this. 

It was however determined that after expanding the pool, with a minimum of 12 MB, then this causes the rounding to a 1MB boundary to take place again, which in turn will allow the stamps to be written, and the pool move to succeed. It will slightly affect the pool size, but also does solve the problem relatively easy.