The Grumpy IT Admin

There is nothing like doing patching or firmware upgrades to really get those buttocks clenching. After so many that have gone wrong it has become one of those jobs I'd rather go on holiday when they are due and leave to someone else who is younger and more care free and has yet to be scarred. The latest round of EqualLogic patching at one of our sites went a bit tom tit. Upgrading from 4.3.7 to 5.0.4 should have been a fairly simple thing, though previously I did experience a small problem with one of the controllers restarting about 15 minutes after the upgrade which was a bit weird I wasn't expecting any issues. However this went completely bonkers after the upgrade. Lots of errors which were triggered by cloning a replicated drive. Replicating would start to fail, drives would disappear and then reappear, the only solution that Dell could come up with was to move to version 5.0.5. as 5.0.4. This was weird as I had been told previously that I should move to 5.0.4 as it w

Another one of those weird things that happen to us admins. This time it was our HP C7000 chassis. On and off we have been getting some errors where the Chassis reports some problem then 1 millisecond later all is well again, also we have had VMware reporting loss of redundancy on the iSCSI connections and packet floods logged on the chassis. Whilst I was off enjoy the sunshine this went completely ballistic to the extent I was getting emails at the rate of 1 every 1 to 10 minutes. I returned to work to find 4000+ emails, not a bad score for 4 days off. A quick Google and the best advice I could find mentioned reboots can make it go away for month but best to do a firmware update, though these mentioned old versions we were on 3.11 and the latest was 3.30 so maybe worth a shot. Given my experiences with EqualLogics (did I mention that another site upgraded their EQ to 5.0.4 and lost all their replication, barely managed to make it through the day with drive intact and had to upda