The other day a co-worker was doing his rounds in the data center, sent the team an email with (photos attached) indicating amber lights on one of the shelves of our Netapp Filer.  Amber lights on a shelf of disk on your SAN usually isn’t a good thing so I jumped onto OnCommand System Manager to begin the troubleshooting.It didn’t take me very long to figure out the problem because the first thing I see after I am logged into OnCommand was a warning that I had “unowned disks”.

The aha moment hit me, just the day before we had 2 disks fail and were replaced via the configured Autosupport. Gosh, I do like the autosupport. Having a disk go bad overnight then getting a replacement before you even walk through the door is very convenient.

When these particular disks were replaced by another co-worker the day before, he had removed the bad disks and inserted the replacement disks. Since our filers are setup with software disk ownership , with disk auto assign disabled, the disks were not assigned automatically to an owner.  Ownership must be assigned for disk(s) before the filer can use them otherwise they are useless and flash amber lights at you.

To assign ownership to the disk(s) SSH into your Filer and do the following :

1. You will need to locate the disk(s) that don’t have any owners. Type the following command
   disk show -n
2. Once you have the disk name of the unowned disk you assign ownership with this command:
   disk assign <disk_name>
   disk assign 0b.16
   for multiple disks < disk assign 0b.43 0b.24 0b.27
   or
   Assign ownership for all unowned disks at once < disk assign all
3. Run disk show -v to verify the disk assignments

So there you go, a pretty simple fix. Next time you replace a failed drive don’t forget to give it an owner!