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Status Delivered
Workspace Storage Scale (formerly known as GPFS)
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 28, 2024

RELATED IDEAS

Preventive alert for cluster key certificate expiration

According to the recent flash " IBM Storage Scale: An expired cluster key prevents nodes from connecting to the Storage Scale cluster resulting in admin commands failing to update the cluster configuration.https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/7145023 (Note: Internal reference D.326872)" when the cluster key expires, it can cause outages to local and remote cluster.

In order to prevent it to happen, new keys needs to be created. However, the administrators will forget to check it or don't know the issue until it happens.

The suggestion is to create a monitoring and events to prevent the cluster to reach the expiration of cluster key, and help client to take actions in advance. 

So Scale should monitor the cluster key certificate time to time and issue events on mmhealth and GUI.
The procedure would be :

Once a week,  check the committed cluster key certificate valid date:
/usr/lpp/mmfs/bin/mmgskkm print --cert id_rsa_committed.cert | grep Valid

If current date is 91 days greater than expiration day, do nothing
If current date is from 60 - 90 days to expiration day, issue a TIP event
If current date is from 30 - 59 days to expiration day, issue a DEGRADED/WARNING  event
If current date is from 0 - 29 days to expiration day, issue a ERROR event

Create a Direct Maintenance Procedure pointing to the https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/7145023 to guide administrators on how to renew the cluster key certificate
 

Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Nov 21, 2025

    Love it! Thanks a lot !😍

    Reply
  • Guest
    Nov 21, 2025
    This has been delivered with 5.2.3 .
    New events have been added which mmhealth will show in case of a upcoming expiration
    https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/storage-scale/5.2.3?topic=events-gpfs

    cert_expires_warn DEGRADED less than 90 days
    Message: The cluster certificate is going to expire in {0} days on {1}. The cluster may go down if not renewed.
    Description: Cluster certificate expires soon, leading to a cluster shutdown if not renewed.
    Cause: The certificate expiration date is in the near future. Validate the certificate expiration using the mmauth show command.
    User Action: The cluster certificate expires soon. Run the mmauth genkey new command followed by the mmauth genkey commit command to renew the cluster certificate.

    cert_expires_fail FAILED less than 10 days
    Message: The cluster certificate is going to expire in {0} days on {1}. The cluster might go down if not renewed.
    Description: Cluster certificate expires very soon, leading to a cluster shutdown if not renewed.
    Cause: The certificate expiration date is in the near future. Validate the certificate expiration using the mmauth show command.
    User Action: Renew the cluster certificate before it expires. Run the mmauth genkey new command followed by the mmauth genkey commit command to renew the cluster certificate.
    Reply

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