Diary of a Bad Golfer

Attend one of the MS Heroes Happen events and you can get a free copy of the following:

Link to signup

To see the full directory path in the title bar instead of just the folder name, open up terminal and follow below:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

killall Finder

This has been out for awhile now, but after having seen National Treasure 2 last night it seemed appropriate.  When you install Exchange 2007 it always installs in the same administrative group - FYDIBOHF23SPDLT.  It also uses a routing group for compatibility, named DWBGZMFD01QNBJR.

What does it mean?  If you shift every letter/number 1 place you get EXCHANGE12ROCKS.

One thing I don’t like in Leopard is the 3d glass dock, I tried switching it to the 2d dock but I didn’t really like that.  On Tiger I had a transparent dock and found a way to get that again.

You need to go into the /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock folder and right click on Dock and click Show Package Contents.  Then go into the Resources folder and backup the frontline.png image as well as all of the images starting with scurve (there should be 4 of them).  After you have them backed up delete the files and run ‘killall Dock’ which will restart your dock and you should have a MUCH better looking dock.

I recently got around to installing Server 2008 on ESX again, I had installed an earlier build before and had to do a number of things to get it installed (load drivers during setup etc). 

Build 6001 installed fine, the only catch I had was I initially set the type to Windows 2003 Enterprise and once the installation was complete and I installed VMware Tools, it wouldn’t launch until I would go to “End VMware Tools” weird… The fix for it is to set the type to Windows Vista, then install VMware Tools.

One of the things I really like about NetApp is the fact that they have an ONTAP simulator, which is surprisingly powerful. I have used it a lot in the past for POC testing. I use it in VMware Workstation 6 with a minimal Debian install (no GUI). After installing the simulator (available from NetApp’s NOW site) it comes with 2 100mb disks. To add more disks there is a script in the /sim directory to run. I used this process to add 8 1000mb disks to my simulator.

/sim/makedisks -n 8 -t 5

Note: If you want to add a different type/size of disk, open up the makedisks script to see the available options.

Once that is done run the simulator with /sim/runsim.sh

After you login to the simulator, the new disks will show up as failed, follow this process to fix.

priv set diag
disk unfail -s v
disk zero spares

Once you are done, type priv set to exit from the diagnostic mode.

Once that is complete you can create a new aggregate using the 1000mb disks you have created. It probably goes without saying but since it is just a simulator uncheck the box for Double Parity when creating the aggregate so you can maximize your storage. Thanks to the NetApp Simulator and being able to use ESX on VMware Workstation I am able to have 2 ESX servers in a cluster with DRS/HA using SAN storage from 2 NetApp Simulators that replicate between each other with SnapMirror - extremely useful for learning.

Dell announced Monday plans to buy IP storage-area network vendor, EqualLogic for $US1.4 billion, strengthening an already booming part of Dell’s business.

The news of the planned deal comes just a week after CEO, Michael Dell hinted the company could be in the market for some bigger-than-usual acquisitions.

EqualLogic, formed in 2001, sells iSCSI storage appliances and in August filed to go public, something it now won’t have to do.

Dell will add EqualLogic’s PS Series iSCSI appliances and technology to its portfolio of PowerVault and Dell/EMC storage arrays, part of a $US600 million business for Dell in its second fiscal 2008 quarter ended Aug. 3 (server revenue totalled $1.6 billion in that period). The company has not clarified its plans to rebrand EqualLogic’s products, but says that it will still sell them through the extensive channel EqualLogic has established. Dell sells a lot of its storage products through EMC, making up 10 per cent of EMC’s accounts receivable in 2006.

“This acquisition is a key part of our strategy to simplify IT and to drive virtualisation from Dell’s enterprise portfolio,” director of storage operations, Mike Arterbury, said.

EqualLogic’s products have been adopted in corporations that are also deploying virtualisation. Dell expects that adding them to its portfolio will allow customers to further simplify their IT setups.

“EqualLogic did a brilliant job of marrying up storage and virtualization,” senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group, Steve Duplessie, said. “The company was basically giving away VMware with their machines. It was a great sales job.”

Duplessie’s reaction to the sale price was “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Fellow analyst, Greg Schulz, of Storage I/O also found the price eye-opening, but said: “If you go by the recent valuation of storage IPOs lately, it is more in line.”

EqualLogic counts among its customers Dickinson-Wright, the Royal British Legion and Babson College.

Dell’s history of acquisitions has been limited primarily to services organizations and recently consumer gaming vendors. The acquisition of EqualLogic would mark Dell’s first buyout of a storage vendor since it snapped up earlyvirtualisation company, ConvergeNet, in 1999 for $US348 million. Subsequent work with ConvergeNet failed to generate a product.

The EqualLogic deal is expected to close late in Dell’s fiscal fourth quarter (which ends in February) or early in its fiscal first quarter (which ends in May).

Source

One of the new features of Leopard is Time Machine a feature that automatically backs up your Mac. The main thing I didn’t like about it is that I have 2+ TB of disk space on my file server, and only a 250 gb USB drive connected to my Mac, using Time Machine the only way I could use it was with the attached USB drive. But I found there is a hack to allow you to use Time Machine with a Windows networked share. From a terminal window type:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Then go to System Preferences, Time Machine and click on Change Disk and you can now select your network share.

Being a NetApp partner, generally every ESX installation I do is backed by NetApp storage.  I had been looking for an open source package that I could run on ESX to monitor the ESX server as well as NetApp storage appliances.

I started out using unnoc, and it seems to do what I am after.  You can grab it from here.  It is built with an IDE disk so if you want to use it on ESX you need change the disk.  To do that run the following (I will assume you are currently in the directory that has the unnoc files) to clone the disk:

vmkfstools -i unnoc-1*.vmdk unnoc-scsi.vmdk

Create a new VM using a custom configuration, select Linux as the Guest os and Other Linux as the version.  Select use an existing virtual disk and use unnoc-scsi.vmdk

Once that is done boot it up, the default login is root/unnoc123.  Change the default password, and configure an IP address, gateway and DNS servers.

• passwd
• ifconfig eth0 <ip> netmask <subnet mask>
• route add default gw <gateway ip>
• nano /etc/resolv.conf

At this point you should be able to SSH into the box as well as view the default unnoc web page on the server.

First thing to do is make sure SNMP is enabled on the filer, from the command line run:

options snmp

Make sure snmp.enable is set to on, then run snmp and it should tell you the the community string is public and set to ro.

Edit the unnoc.conf file: nano /var/www/unnoc/etc/unnoc.conf

scroll to the very bottom and add a new entry:

host {
                hostname = <filer name>
                community = public
                type = netapp
        }

Adding the esx server:

host {
        hostname = <esx server>
        service_url = https://<esx server>/sdk/vimService
        community = public
        type = esx
        user = <user>
        password = <password>
}

Note: You may need to check your settings on the ESX firewall if you run into communication problems.

I’ve been studying pretty hard for my VMware VCP certification lately, and needed to learn more about DRS/HA etc.  Without a few tweaks you cannot run ESX inside of Workstation, but here is how you can do it with Workstation 6.  Note: you need to have an Intel VT capable chipset with it enabled in the BIOS.

Create a new VM and choose ‘Custom’, select ‘Workstation 5′ hardware compatibility and select the box for ESX Server Compatible.  Select Linux as the guest operating system and leave it as Red Hat Linux.  Use 2 processors.  Set the SCSI Adapter to LSI Logic.

Once the VM is created, you need to add a few things into the .vmx file.  Note: The line for ethernet0.present = "TRUE" may already exist

• ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
• ethernet0.connectionType = "bridged"
• ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
• ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
• monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = TRUE
• monitor_control.vt32 = "TRUE"

That’s it, now you should be able to install and use ESX server on Workstation 6, for storage check out FreeNAS or OpenFiler for iSCSI/NFS connectivity or for Windows take a look at Starwind.