The EqualLogic strikes back Pt2

Well the SATA channel card replacement went well. The Unisys engineer had some experience from last time and after we checked which card we need to replace about 20 times and read the swap out instructions 10 times which tell you to just pull the failed card, we spotted a little advisory to ring support before just pulling the card.

Now our SATA card hadn't actually failed we just had one path that was a bit dicky and this was on the primary card so just pulling it out is not really a good idea. There's no little fail light to show which card needs to be swapped and there is no way to flash a locator light on any parts in an EqualLogic like there is with HP kit which is major failing in my book. I guess you get what you pay for.

There is a couple of commands you need to enter from a terminal session plugged in to the live controller, one to shut down the card and one to bring it on line, this went smooth as silk this time, unlike last time when we enabled it and 6 drives failed on us. The Dell support at first inssited we just pull the card but after some conversations they ran through the commands with us.

Yes everything was up and running at the time, no VMs were shut down and everything went hunky dory.

It's nice when everything just works.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scripting DNS entries

For reasons to do with DR we needed to change our IP addressing scheme, either for our servers or for our PCs and printers and what not. Obviously changing PCs and printers was a whole lot easier due to the possible issues of inept developers’ hard coding IP addresses causing no end of problems with re-addressing the servers. This has entailed changing all the DNS entries for our printers, (whatever happened to the paperless office?) That in itself is no real challenge, they all have web interfaces so a quick connect and amend the setting then next printer. Updating the DNS entries was going to be a bit tiresome so I did a quick Google on how to do this with a script and up popped DNSCMD. You can run this from a CMD box on your PC, the main options you need to know are /recorddelete and /recordadd. To delete a record you simple need to type dnscmd <ServerName> /recorddelete <ZoneName> <NodeName> <RRType> <RRData>[/f] What does all that mean? Well i
Read more

Enterprise Vault - Failed Exchange Task

Here's another weird one. Enterprise Vault, we use this for e-mail archiving. It does a reasonable job. Probably no better or worse than any similar product. A couple of days ago I noticed that there was warning that it hadn't archived anything from one of our mailbox servers for a couple of days, not big issue as there is just a couple mailboxes on there as it used for testing at the moment. I had a look at the associated task and it was stopped. Started it and it failed. Error in the event log looked something like below The Task 'Exchange Mailbox Archiving Task for EXCH' failed to log on to Exchange server 'EXCH' using mailbox 'SMTP:EnterpriseVault@symantec.local'. Please ensure the mailbox has not been hidden, that the server is running and that the Vault account has sufficient permissions on the server. I went through every conceivable setting in AD, EV and Exchange trying to work out what had happened and why it wasn't working on thi
Read more

Windows Phone to iPhone - a painful transition

Windows Phone died a death due to a whole heap of incompetence from Microsoft.  My phone was an old Nokia 925, about 4 1/2 years old and bought and paid by my company. There were always low requirements for company phones, if it rung and you answered it, all was good. Then Hangouts reared its head (Google want to destroy MS, so WP support) but third-party support gave a stay of execution. The final nail was a requirement for out of hours support software that had no app for Windows Phone. I had to be “downgraded” to an iPhone 6s (yes, it is a low spec 2 version old iPhone, better hardware than my 925 but not really up there as a current version, how my company loves their staff, buy expensive crap rather than cheap crap). Stuff that just worked on my old phone, now needs 'me' to be re-engineered to work the Apple way.  This is only slightly less bad than the Google eat all your life and sell it back to you way, but it is like stepping back in to the 1990s Microsoft way
Read more