HP SIM 5.3 kills iLOv2

Uncategorized | Mar 18, 2009

Recently at the request of our vendor (HP), I went and had HP Systems Insight Manager updated to 5.3 about 3 weeks. Now this isn't "bleeding edge" and so I didn't feel it was a big deal to jump up to it already. Well over the past 3 weeks I've been getting this new alert coming from our SIM system and I just figured "Oh.. something new" and didn't fret about it too much.

Event Name: (SNMP) Remote Insight/ Integrated LightsOut Interface Error (9006)

URL: https://HPSIM:2381/

Event originator: HPSIM

Event Severity: Major

Event received: 12-Mar-2009, 17:31:02

Event description: Remote Insight/ Integrated Lights-Out Interface Error. The host OS has detected an error in the Remote Insight/ Integrated Lights-Out interface. The firmware is not responding.

As you can tell from my lazy comments, this became a pretty big deal as iLO was completely toasty on these boxes where SIM was generating this alert. I contacted HP and it was a pretty entertaining exchange.

HP Support: Are you running HP SIM 5.3?

Me: Yes

HP Support: Do you have iLO version 1.60 or 1.61?

Me: Beats me. The iLOs are not responding so I have zero way to tell.

HP Support: I think I know your problem.

Me: Well don't leave me hanging here.

HP Support: I'm reading an email alert that came through while we were talking. There's a hotfix for HP SIM 5.3 and a recommendation to go up to firmware 1.70 for the iLO.

Me: Oh great. *sigh*

So now I get to physically pull power cords to fix iLOs everywhere. (Yes this means an OS reboot too.)

* Hey HP. Put a button onto the servers to "reboot the iLO".

Cisco joins the Server Market

Server Virtualization and VMware | Mar 17, 2009

Today's big news:

Cisco has come out with a single stop full solution rack for CPU, Disk & Network in one using all the best of virtualization technology of Storage, Server & Networking. Tight VMware integration, all Cisco hardware & lots of virtualization technology at 10G.

Over the past several years I've kinda figured that Cisco has lost their way. Floundering a bit. Now I know someone at Cisco has a brain. VMware has blazed the path in recent history into the Enterprise Datacenter. The gotcha has been trying to integrate with networking and storage. This is in theory resolved by this solution of a fully integrated delivered product line.

So how does HP & IBM & Dell correspond with this?

ACLs and CIFS under OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris | Feb 10, 2009

One of the issues with running a file server in the home is the fact that you have multiple computers and accounts (the wife, the kids etc) accessing the same directory trees. The default user/group works pretty well as you have effectively a single group for family access. Different groups are used for more computer based access needs such as server to server communication. However I found that the kernel CIFS doesn't create files with proper access very well using the standard UNIX permissions.

ACLs are the solution in this case.

# zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed -o sharesmb=name=storage -o quota=275G usbpool/storage
# cd /usbpool/storage
# chgrp home .
# chmod A=group@:rwxpdDaARWcCos:fd:allow .

Now when you create a new folder or files under this CIFS folder it creates them with the group permissions. I leave everyone in the same group and can add the secondary group as necessary for different shares needing permissions.

When users create files they are created with:

----rwx---+ 1 me home 7930 Feb 7 2008 test.txt

And when they create directories they are:

d---rwx---+ 2 me home 3 Feb 9 22:10 OpenSolaris

Doable and functional. I still wish there was better documentation that I could find around the ACL permissions and how they work. I'm doing testing and I know I'm missing things.

OpenSolaris 2008.11 & ESX (Security Part 2)

Uncategorized | Feb 5, 2009

If you are using OpenSolaris and NFS for your datastores and using ESX you need to share out your zfs filesystems with anon=0 since ESX wants to write to the NFS datastore as root.

zfs set sharenfs=anon=0 usbpool/virtuals

I wouldn't mind having stuff like this if I could figure out how to properly get logging of the issues/connections in OpenSolaris. Anybody know how to increasing logging for the NFS services in OpenSolaris?

OpenSolaris 2008.11 & NFS (security?)

OpenSolaris and VMware | Feb 4, 2009

A quick note here after the past 4 hours of fighting with NFS on OpenSolaris 2008.11. If you are attempting to do an mount and get a Permission Denied from either Linux or ESX the solution is rather easy.

Make sure that the IP address that you are connecting with has a reverse DNS entry with a hostname.

That's it. 4 hours and that's the gotcha. If you don't have a reverse DNS you'll never get the mount to work.