Best posts made by jrc

So currently I have 2 HP servers that are being used and XenServer hosts. The shared storage is on an HP MSA1040 SAN, connected via 8Gb/s Fiber.

The servers have worked flawlessly since I got them, not a single issue and have only been re-booted for updates and upgrades. I cannot say the same for the SAN. It has gone done about 4 or 5 times, and these outages have highlighted the fragility of my setup.

The HP servers have 24 2.5" drive bays. So I am contemplating filling them with drives and moving away from the SAN, but in order to that I would need the space to be shared between the two hosts.

How can I do that? What would that look like? What kind of cost would it be (outside of buying the drives) and is it a good idea?

Someone mentioned VSAN to me while I was talking about this, but I am not that clued up about VSANs and how they work or how they are put together.

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated. But please don't lecture me on how bad a SAN is, and that my setup is doomed or that I am an idiot for doing it this way. I am looking for a path forward and not a beratement for things that have long since passed.

Ok, so I had an issue with an SBS 2011 server and ended up bouncing it quite hard as it was locked at 100% and Xen could not shut it down. Hard powered the host in order to get it back and running.

But now I have a very odd problem, the Xen PV network adapter is set to have a static IP of 192.168.0.254, but when it comes up it is trying to use its "Preferred" ip of 169.whatever.

According to some google searches this can happen when the there is a duplicate IP on the network, which there is not. I cannot ping in or out from this server.

So a while back I did some updates on Xen and had to re-install the Xen Tools which did not go so well, once issue was it never installed the PV network stuff, and there was a Realtek nic installed, which I configured, but then realized this was wrong and re-installed the Xen Tools, which worked the second time and everything was happy. So I am wondering if the "conflict" is actually between the Xen nic and the now hidden Realtek nic? If so, how in the hell do I get to that hidden nic to change it's config? Or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

I have tried rebooting the server again, hoping that maybe a clean re-boot would fix it, to no avail.

Not sure where to go from here...

How about "Not that crap called School Dude" ? I'd buy it.... (Can you tell how I feel about School dude??)

@JaredBusch

I've never actually used either TBH. I came up on IBM and IBM clones.

Hi everyone,

I am trying to add a new zone to my DNS server (Debian 6 running Bind). But it's just not working.

Basically in order for me to force safe search on my network I need to create a zone for www.google.com, then create a cname for www.google.com and point it to forcesafesearch.google.com. Simple enough, except it's not working and I have no idea why.

Here are my config files:

named.conf:

=================================================

include "/etc/bind/named.conf.options";
include "/etc/bind/named.conf.local";
include "/etc/bind/named.conf.default-zones";

=================================================

named.conf.local

=================================================

zone "www.google.com" {
type master;
file "/etc/bind/www.google.com.hosts";
};

=================================================

www.google.com.hosts

=================================================

$ttl 12h

www.google.com. IN SOA ns.www.google.com. ns.www.google.com. (
2016052601
1d
15m
2w
1h )

www.google.com. IN NS ns.www.google.com

ns.www.google.com. IN A 10.1.1.2

@ IN CNAME forcesafesearch.google.com.

=================================================

Yet here are the results of an NSLookup

BASH
Picard:~ <user>$ nslookup www.google.com 10.1.1.2

Server: 10.1.1.2
Address: 10.1.1.2#53

** server can't find www.google.com: NXDOMAIN

=================================================

Tearing my hair out over this. So any help would be greatly appreciated.

When they say 500Gb of bandwidth, what does the mean? 500Gb/hour? per day? per year?

Also, for $5/mo you can get double the RAM, double the bandwidth and 5 more Gb of storage. So even if the lowest plan is sold out, the next one up is still very reasonable.

@MattSpeller

5160 for me, but I did step through all the others (286, 386, 486 etc)

@DustinB3403 said in Xenserver Space Woes:

~ Reboot now! No time for the weekend.. If it's gonna break its gonna break on company time damn it! ~

Well it's not broken now, everything is working as expected. So if I can schedule the down time it'll be better for everyone. However I am getting a "Run out of space while coalescing," which come to think on it may also be related...

There is a fundamental misunderstanding from this author about why RAID exists, and that is to offer some immunity to hard drive failure, nothing more, nothing less.

Reason being, you may have protection against hardware failure but when it comes to protection against corrupt files, errors or malicious activity, you have serious vulnerabilities.

Well no shit sherlock. RAID is purely to protect you against the first bit, a decent backup scheme protects against the second, it was never conceived of or designed to do more than protect against hardware failure.

Since there is an increased stress on the array when data bits are gathered to rebuild the failed and erroneous disc, there is the potential risk of double-disk fault and read error – hence the shift from RAID to more recent data storage mechanisms.

Umm, more recent data storage mechanisms? What, like RAID10? Any "mecahnism" that involves data spread out across lots of disks with some sort of redundancy is going to be a RAID array by definition. It is an Redundant Array (or collection) of Independent Disks after all.

What an idiotic out of touch (and date) article.

@travisdh1 said in So I bought an abandoned Storage unit in Paradise, CA - Tons of vinage computer stuff was inside.:

Please tell me I wasn't the only one that had a special boot floppy made just to eek enough memory to run that one program that really needed all 4MB of memory?

Nope, I had spent a ton of time getting my memory config right. I remember I had it booting up completely with 620Kb of the 640k free as I had managed to push everything into the upper memory area,

There is a Delorean owner in my area, I've seen the car a few times on the road.

Well something changed overnight, becuase now when I look at the storage useage it says:

Used: 6505.4Gb and Allocated: 6734.8Gb

So why on earth has my allocated amount gone up by nearly 2587Gb?

sigh this is very very odd...

EDIT: Just did a rescan, and now it says Used:6505.4 Allocated: 4147.8. So it's back to "normal"

The "free" audible with Prime is very limited in scope, you'd have to subscribe to the full Audible to get audiobooks.

That said I drive, like a lot, 2 hours each way to work everyday. And audio books are a big part of what keeps me sane. If I went the audible way then I would be bankrupt pretty quickly.

Libraries are a good place to get audio books, but I still go through them faster than I can get them, though most libraries have online digital checkout options for audio books, so check with your local library on that.

When all else fails I torrent audio books. I belong to a private torrent community that does nothing but audio books. It has come in very handy.

I really wish someone would start a Netflix type audiobook service, and all you can listen to flat rate service.

@momurda said in Xenserver Space Woes:

What does your storage server say about all this?

Nada. It's happily running as intended.

I get up at 530a. Wonder why the hell I did not get to bed earlier, shower, pee and jump in the car by 6am. Get if it looks like I am gonna get to work at 730a, then I stop and grab a cup of tea and a small snack, it if look like it'll be closer to 8am, then I don't stop.

You'd think that I'd get to bed nice and early given the real f-ing early start, well that be the wise thing to do, however I usually get to bed around 10pm, sometime a lot later. I have never been, nor will I ever be, a morning person....

Anyone know where I can get some rails for these servers that will work in a 2 post rack (with some 4 post adapters), the included rails are too thick and hit the posts. I could jam them in, but that'd cause them to bow out and obviously won't work.

Never had this issue with my HP servers, or any of my dell servers.Thanks in advanced!

@scottalanmiller said in Rack Rails for Cisco BE6000M servers:

@jrc said in Rack Rails for Cisco BE6000M servers:

Never had this issue with my HP servers, or any of my dell servers.Thanks in advanced!

Welcome to the Cisco world.

Great.... What really ticks me off is that the VAR was in our MDF, saw the racks and never said a thing. But I suppose I should not be too surprised, there are a few other issues that have cropped up that could have been avoided with a slightly more detailed visit to our MDF (they refused to send someone out for a visual).

So my IOPs seem to be jumping between 0 and 900k fairly quickly. But the Queue size seems to stay between 0 and 1, with the latency very low (near zero) as well. Network traffic is well under 1MBps. This is from the performance meters on the Xen master host.

@travisdh1 said in Rack Rails for Cisco BE6000M servers:

@jrc said in Rack Rails for Cisco BE6000M servers:

@scottalanmiller said in Rack Rails for Cisco BE6000M servers:

I think eyeballing might be the only option.

This may be a stupid question, but how would you recommend I do that?

Take some pictures of the thing and show us, maybe?

Well there you go again, with your exceptionally reasonable and well thought out suggestions....

I'll see if I can grab some decent pictures later this afternoon. The servers are in production, sitting on the floor in the bottom of the rack, so it may be a bit tricky. I'll also see if I can grab some measurements while I am at it (stud separation distance).

Ok, let's see if this works....

The images are here