The Grumpy IT Admin

My company recently merged with another company, doubling the size and doubling the IT requirement. This has meant that our existing VMware platform with iSCSI EqualLogic was not really up to the task as it was beginning to creak anyway and doubling it to support more than 500-750 servers was unlikely to expand. Time to look at some grown up storage again.   Usual suspects, EMC, NetApp, Dell and HP. Key features required were expandability, replication, off host backups at remote site. There were a number of other minor things like making copies of live SQL databases between live and dev systems and storage tiering. Dell Compellant, HP EVA/3Par, EMC VNX, NetApp were all in the frame. Hardware wise all came in around the same prices, software wise it was different story for the replication and backup piece, the dell offering went off down the NetBackup route which is stupidly expensive and cost more than the hardware so that was first to go. HP went before we starte...

It's quick it can allow you to have one cable to your monitor, it's quick and err that's about it. What's not good is that you can't get it on anything other than a Mac without paying out a good deal of money, even the cables are around c£30 (c$45), a recently acquired Drobo storage unit came with a TB and USB 3 ports but only a USB cable, surely this tells you something? There is no such thing as a TB expansion card that you put in to a computer. Intel seems to have missed the point. Proprietary standards always fail unless they offer something you can't get somewhere else and become ubiquitous before any competing standard can get a foot in, HDMI managed this trick but is slowly being replaced by Display Port, which is an open standard and has no licencing fees associated with it. USB took off simple because it was on every computer before it was even supported by the OS, every update has been backward compatible. Anyone in retail will tell that if you ...

We have had some problems with our EqualLogics (no surprise there) doing the most simple of thing, emailing through our exchange 2010 relay. 2003 worked fine, however 2010 seems to cause a number of problems. Small notification emails are fine, however, when it comes to the diagnostics emails with their vast 2-5MB attachments something chokes and we get a time out error at the EqualLogics end, something like 'diag' or 'update' was unable to send output using e-mail. SMTP returned the following error: TimeOut] Some Googling suggests that it is either the Tarpitting Microsoft have stuck in that creates a 5 second delay to proceedings for security, or something a bit more deeper in the SMTP protocol on the receive connector on the CAS\Hub server, namely chunking and binary mime settings and it is all related to BDAT. By default the Tarpitting is set to 5 seconds, some folks have found that setting this to 0 or turning it off works for them, it didn't for me, nei...

VMware used to be very good at releasing stable mature and sensible upgrades, though of late that seems to have gone a bit wonky. The latest vSphere release 5/1 is a bit of a headache to install due to the inclusion of RSAs SSO module. RSA is another part of EMC, the ultimate owner of VMware. Now the cynical may see this as a way of getting RSA product in to companies. if it is the case then it will back fire spectacularly as RSA products have generally been a bit clunky, unintuitive to use and difficult/pernickety to install and configure. I remember needing to the time on our RSA server to not use Daylight Saving Time as the RSA product couldn't cope with it. Unfortunately the SSO module in the current 5.1 install of Virtual Centre seems to have its own problems. Despite its best efforts it fails miserably to find AD, it suggest that maybe AD is not installed, running or some other problem with the environment, clearly indicating the short fall in performance is nothing to do...

There has been plenty written about Windows 8 and the changes Microsoft have made to the interface and the Metro/Modern UI. Yes it is damn irritating, but Stardock comes to the rescue for a mere $5. Microsoft should have offered this as a freebie on the Desktop OS, it is a small thing, users would then get used to the tile thing and Modern apps at their own pace and not have it imposed upon them, it would not have been a difficult thing to set up, as Stardock have proved, they could even have offered the UI as an overlay in the same way they did with Media Centre to allow people to come to terms with it or use it by default if they so choose to or it worked with their device. However the UI is not the only place where Microsoft seem to have shot themselves in the foot. Removal of start up options (F8, Safe mode, LKG etc) can only be accessed after OS is running. Burning stuff to DVDs seems more difficult than before No support for DVD videos All the old games have gone (replace...

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...

A power outage at the weekend caused unscheduled shutdowns on our servers. All came back OK and were working fine. However our backup of the Exchange 2010 server failed as Backup Exec could not connect to the Database. We have a DAG set up to a DR site, we failover manually if required and for when we need to do maintenance, it all works rather well. DAGs have an IP address assigned to them which is actually related to the Windows Cluster service, which if the servers are in different subnets have be different depending on which server is active. I believe this is controlled by the Cluster service, Exchange then updated DNS to point to the new server when you move to a different active server. Unfortunately despite not having auto failover the cluster service moved the IP address, Exchange, however, did not update DNS as the active DB had not moved. Bringing the server back up didn't change anything. So we now had the cluster IP address in the DR site and the DB on the productio...