Exadata check IB cables

One of the things that helps make the Exadata perform at the speed it is performing is the fact that the connections between the compute nodes and the storage nodes is based upon Infiniband . In some cases also other, external components, are connected to the Exadata by making use of Infiniband . Infiniband is an intergrated and vital part of Exadata. The below presentation gives a quick introduction into the Infiniband cabling of a full rack Exadata and how you can connect other Oracle Engineered systems to a Exadata Infiniband  fabric.

Oracle infiniband cabling for Oracle appliances from Johan Louwers

In normal situations all cables should be present in an Exadata. However, in some cases due to some reason a cable might have been unplugged. As datacenters are often not near the location where engineers are it can be handy to have the ability to check the state of the cables from the commandline without the need to be physically present in the datacenter. The below bash script enables you to check the state of the cables on both the compute as well as the storage servers.

for ib_cable in `ls /sys/class/net | grep ^ib`; do 
  printf "$ib_cable: "; cat /sys/class/net/$ib_cable/carrier; 
done 

The output will tell you if the cable is present per Infiniband interface. A 1 indicates that a cable is found a 0 indicates that no cable is found.