Network Design

February 11th, 2009 · The Fraser · Network Administration No comments

Part of my tasks for the Data center Move is to rack, build, config the networking equipment. We have racked 99% of the network equipment and are now configuring everything. Part of the problem is the network hasn’t been accurately planned and the Firewall rules are for the most part incomplete. We have a lot of work ahead of us.

I keep saying I’ll get some pics up soon but I haven’t had the time to sit down and collect them all and post to flickr/Picasa (still haven’t picked which one I want to use).

Just an update

February 3rd, 2009 · The Fraser · Systems Administration No comments

The company I work for is building out a cage for our equipment and I am heading off much of the planning and foot work. Thus I am unable to post as often since I have little to no free time.

I will be posting images of the Datacenter changes soon.

Jira Addiction

January 4th, 2009 · The Fraser · Project Management One comment - Tags: ,

My employer is evaluating (evaluating in the sense that we haven’t bought yet but intend to in a month) Jira and Confluence. It has been in active use by our Senior Systems Admin since he started and no one has really migrated to it. I kind of avoided migrating as I don’t want to adapt and become dependent on something that may not be purchased.

Anyways, We have a huge project going on right now that requires lots of communication among the various people in the department and I started using Jira…. and I am now officially addicted. Addicted to the point that I want to play with Jira more than hangout with friends or play a few video games.  With the integration of Jira into Confluence process, it makes it even easier to fully adapt.

Presently we have been using Trac as our company wiki, issue tracker, etc… I never really grew to it as I disliked so many things about it. Editing pages and transferring data to Trac from excel was always a pain. Jira on the other hand doesn’t have the same issues. In my personal projects, I have been using Redmine, but Jira’s Subtasks and Task Linking is the clincher for me. There is little that I do now that I can’t do in Jira/Confluence.  I just hope that the management doesn’t get stingy again and cutoff my latest professional stimulant.

MSExchangeIS #8217

December 17th, 2008 · The Fraser · Windows Administration No comments - Tags: , ,

Recently our Sr. Director of IT sent out a Calendar invite to the team for meetings to plan our major project. He sent this meeting to a few select developers and the Operations group. But when he sent to the Operations group, he didn’t expand the group and add each user. He added the Security Group. This caused a serious of errors in Exchange that didn’t permit any user on the Ops group to add the event to their calendars. After being asked to fix this when the person in charge of Exchange was less than adequate for the task, I went searching through the Event Viewer. Found many errors and reduced it to a few that stood out, Error #8217, #8260 & #3005.

#8217 pointed to the particular Calendar event and creator of the event. #8260 logged the inability to access this event using anything other than MS Outlook (OWA and Non-MAPI clients).

ESXi password changing Part #2

December 15th, 2008 · The Fraser · Vmware Administration No comments - Tags: , , ,

After finding all the recommendations online to not work. I was forced to completely rebuild the system. This means since its a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with PERC6/i, I had to delete all RAID Virtual Disks. The reason for this was a glitch I had found when first installing the box some 5 months ago. If you configure a ESXi server on a PERC Controller that has more than 1 Virtual Disk, it will not boot. You have to complete installation using one VDisk then successfully reboot it. Once its up, you have to reboot once more create any other onboard VDisks you need then boot completely. It will automatically detect the new drive and format it with VMFS for you.

All this to say I spent most of my day rebuilding an ESXi Host to recover from a lost password. Since this machine will be folded into our VirtualCenter in the near future, it might behoove me to just reinstall using ESX proper like the other servers. I will do some through testing of the host before had to see if there is anything to gain from using the lighter hypervisor over its far more robust RedHat bound ESX brother.

Network changes at home

December 15th, 2008 · The Fraser · Network Administration No comments - Tags: , , ,

Not sure how to say this but… Apple sucks sometimes!

I, being the dutiful Applite that i am, purchased the Airport Extreme for my home. I bought it so that I get the most out of my 802.11 N experience. Being this is acting as my home router i have found some weird anomalies with its routing table. Sometimes it will “forget” the routing table. At these times, I am able to communicate to the internet via the default gateway, but am unable to communicate to other systems on my network. This greatly disturbs me as there is much that I am running on my home network.

In my glee brought upon by the hope of a brighter future without my Airport serving as the router, I purchased a Cisco 2611 with a few ADSL & T1 WICs. This handy device will give me the ability to vlan, single point of NATing (Double Natting errors suck…). Presently i am programming it to authenticate my DSL account then I can setup my network. Properly.

Another interesting thing I found. When running the Airport extreme with a Mixed environment (my wife’s laptop and my iphone are not N-capable), network efficiency is greatly reduced. My task after moving everything over to the Cisco is to configure two wifi networks one for N, other for G.

Update on homebrew ESXi Host

December 4th, 2008 · The Fraser · Vmware Administration No comments - Tags: ,

I had built my first ESXi host with homebrewed hardware. There was a bunch of hardware lying around and had heard of people installing ESXi on their hardware (Mike D’s ESXi Host)

ESXi Host Info

ESXi Host Info

As having ones own host beats using Fusion any day, I couldn’t resist. I am in the process of building an iSCSI server to provide a nice backend. This host was built using a Winfast C51GM03 Motherboard, Dual Core AMD Opteron and 4GB of cheap RAM. I am not expecting this box to “blow your mind” concerning performance (Thats reserverd for the Dual-Quad core 32GB RAM servers at work, 35 hosts on each), but this will do in a pinch for 4 home Linux hosts for me to test host creation and automation tools.

ESXi password changing

December 4th, 2008 · The Fraser · Vmware Administration No comments - Tags: ,

So I have a new ESXi host i setup about 5 months ago and was never used (and of course when it was set up it was HIGHEST PRIORITY). So I am trying to go back to the box and the password that have documented is not working, a couple of people had access to this machine while I was away on my Honeymoon and now I am locked out.

After doing some heavy researching, there is no way to recover the password from ESXi as there is no service console that I can boot to first as one can with ESX.

To resolve this situation:

1) Place ESXi Installer disk in drive and boot to it.

2) During the install phase you will be asked to repair or reinstall. Please select repair as this will not destroy your VMFS stores.

3) After it has finished installing the hypervisor, you should be able to finish installation as you did the first time and attach your Storage device. Then you can add your VMs as you had done once before.

Sadly this is the only way to recover from a failure of the mind and forgetful co-workers. The only way to get any more advanced support from VMware is to purchase  Virtual Center License.

Projects

December 4th, 2008 · The Fraser · Project Management One comment

Greetings,

Welcome to Intriguing Problems. This is a blog where I can document the many things I have found and discovered resolution to. Many of my topics will be exploring my work projects (these tend to be the most productive to talk about). These Projects range from Linux Administration to Network Administration. I will also be discussing my many personal Projects. I have provided a list below.

Below is my present list of Projects.

Personal Projects:

1. Home VMware ESXi server

2. Openfiler iSCSI server

3. Cisco Home router

4. eFIX Mac Pro

5. Home IPSEC VPN

As I find more things to discuss I will expand upon my blog.

- Aaron Fraser