Inside Blackhole

Howdy,

Its going to be a busy few weeks going through the upgrade stages for SANOS 3.2. There are some pretty major features in this release 18/4 multiprotocol (super duper) line cards to name but one - Pity “partners” don’t has them on their price lists… when will Cisco just start selling direct!!

There is also some large changes around the iscsi front for “large” deployments… will update sooner than later!

I have received my NBU 6.5 media and have been going over the documentation this last few days.

Some disappointing things in the initial release -
1. No changes to the Oracle/RMAN package… the current one is crap, perhaps they should get some advice from a dba on how to backup databases properly
2. STILL only EMC and HP disk array support for the array integrated snapshots
3. No individual mailbox backups with Exchange 2007 until 6.5.1

Howdy,

Got this working today with a bit of tinkering…

Ok, I have 10x ge interfaces in a machine.

2x Active/Passive failover

4x Active/Active using 802.3ad (LACP)

4x Active/Active using 802.3ad (LACP)

So, I have the two active/passive as the “management” interface for a NBU media server and the other 8x as two 4gb interfaces each on a different subnet. This gets me quite a bit of bandwidt

Ok, how is it done?  Well simple (now that I know ;)  )

$ cat /etc/modprobe.conf

install bond0 /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install -o bonding0 bonding mode=1 miimon=100
remove bond0 /sbin/modprobe -r –ignore-remove bonding0
install bond1 /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install -o bonding1 bonding mode=4 miimon=100
remove bond1 /sbin/modprobe -r –ignore-remove bonding1
install bond2 /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install -o bonding2 bonding mode=4 miimon=100
remove bond2 /sbin/modprobe -r –ignore-remove bonding2

And then standard entries is /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond[0-2] and ifcfg-eth[0-9]

Linux + NBU is getting better and better now

Not sure if people are aware but…

It looks like Symantec Netbackup 6.5 will be released in ~Sept07.

Personally I can’t wait for this as I have been holding off deploying 6.0 due to the insane amount of bugs in it (remeber 4.5 people? )

Some key things to note, software based de-dupe (a licensed feature of course) and NBU will now become volume based licensed.

Good for people with tonnes of clients and not much data - Sucks for those with few clients and tonnes of data :\

Howdy,

I thought I would do a quick post on how to configure up MRTG to perform basic monitoring of Cisco’s MDS range of switches (Using RHEL4).

This is pretty basic:

1. We need to ensure that the switch is configured to allow SNMP - With administrator access (role = network-admin) login to the switch and perform the following “show snmp“#show snmp
sys contact: san-admin@blackhole.com.au
sys location: Collins st Datacentre - RACK09RU00

6722323 SNMP packets input
0 Bad SNMP versions
0 Unknown community name
0 Illegal operation for community name supplied
0 Encoding errors
48513250 Number of requested variables
0 Number of altered variables
6461011 Get-request PDUs
261231 Get-next PDUs
0 Set-request PDUs
6722322 SNMP packets output
0 Too big errors
578411 No such name errors
0 Bad values errors
0 General errors

Community Group / Access
——— —————
public network-operator
User Auth Priv Groups
____ ____ ____ ______
monitoring no no network-operator

You need to either create a SNMPv3 account with network-operator role or enable a community.

2. Now that you have SNMP access, you need to create a MRTG config (This script will output to STDOUT)

#!/bin/bash
cfgmaker \
–global “WorkDir: /var/www/mrtg/mds/” \
–global “Options[_]: growright,bits” \
–ifref=nr \
–ifdesc=descr \
public@1.1.1.1

3. put this little script into cron to run once a day and output to /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg

4. RHEL4 automatically has a CRON job to run MRTG every five minutes.

Thats seriously about it.

I am in the process of creating a PHP index page that will automatically index the files with a really nice graphic of the switch in question with mouse overs to show the interface alias etc.

Not rocket science but its pretty good to have the statistics running all the time. To make it quicker you might want to use the MRTG/RRD plugin so it doesnt generate the graphics all the time

Hi,

I thought I would quickly write up a little how-to on adding a new iscsi initiator to a Cisco MDS 9000 with a IPS….

Step 1.
Add the initiator to the required VSAN:
iscsi initiator ip-address 192.168.1.100
vsan 999

Step 2. (if required)
Add some static pwwn’s from the switch pool (this is only needed if you perform LUN masking/security)
iscsi initiator ip-address 192.168.1.100
static pwwn system-assign 1

Step 3.
Add to zones… if any…

Step 4.
Add to zonesets….

I will finish these steps tomorrow night…. caio!

Welcome to the start of the blackhole inner workings…

There will be posts on anything that I am currently working on…  It will range from SAN, NAS, Backup/Recovery, storage in general, networking and any crazy hardware mods that i’m doing