hpasmcli locks up a DL380G3

[Greg Eden <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello

First of all many thanks for the port of these tools to FreeBSD,  
something I'd dreamt about for a long time. The lack of RAID  
management tools for FreeBSD on DLxxx hardware was quite crippling.  
OK, they have been removed but at least I know they are actively  
being worked on.

Sadly though I've been experiencing problems with the hpasmcli  
utility on a number of machines, which today culminated in the  
locking up of a production webserver. I was taking what seem to be a  
small risk running it in that environment but initial tests had shown  
it to be quite stable.

The box that locked up was a DL380G3 which reports as below, running  
FreebSD 5.3R-p5

System        : ProLiant DL380 G3
Serial No.    : xxxxxxxxxxxx
ROM version   : P29 05/01/2004
iLo present   : Yes
Embedded NICs : 2
        NIC1 MAC: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
        NIC2 MAC: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Processor: 0
        Name         : Intel Xeon
        Stepping     : 9
        Speed        : 2800 MHz
        Bus          : 400 MHz
        Socket       : 1
        Level2 Cache : 512 KBytes
        Status       : Ok

Processor total  : 1

Memory installed : 1024 MBytes
ECC supported    : Yes

What appears to happen is thus:

1. For a period of days or weeks the hpasmcli and hpasmd work just fine.
2. After some period of time, in the order of weeks, when hpasmcli is  
run it will just print:

HP management CLI for FreeBSD (v7.22)
Copyright 2003,2005 Hewlett-Packard Development Group, L.P.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--
NOTE: Some hpasmcli commands may not be supported on all Proliant  
servers.
      Type 'help' to get a list of all top level commands.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--

and then hang, without showing the hpasmcli> prompt for input. In the  
past it's been possible to Ctrl-C break out. Restarting the hpasmd  
daemon will see hpasmcli working fine again. Given the usefulness of  
the utility I've been willing to live with that. However today  
running hpasmcli seems to have instantly locked the box, both at the  
console and via ssh. I've been using hpasmcli since it's public release.

The other HP boxes I have include two DL360G4s with FreeBSD 5.4-p1  
and a DL360G3 with FreeBSD 5.3-p4 . They have shown the hpasmcli  
hanging behaviour, but never locked up hard.

Unfortunately all the HP boxes I have are currently in production and  
I can't run any  further diagnostics, traces etc.

Has anyone else seen this behaviour? Is a fix likely?

best wishes

greg.