Shorts: Get your free ESTA while it’s hot!

9 08 2010

Word got out this morning that starting September 8th 2010, you will need to pay USD $14.- when you apply for a travel approval for the US. You can do that by filling out the so called ESTA form. Most people without a visa for the USA remember the green I-94W visa waiver that you needed to fill out. This has been mostly replaced by the online version of the form which can be found on the ESTA website and can be requested by the people from the following countries.

What most people don’t seem to know, is that you can create a request on the website that is valid for two years. Most people I know (and I was one of them) used to fill out an ESTA application on the website prior to each visit to the US. Basically, there’s nothing wrong with that, and the approach is still valid. But, starting September 8th 2010, you will simply have to pay USD $14.- each time you fill out the form. However, if you fill out the form prior to this date, you can create a request that is valid for two years once it has passed all checks.

How do you do that? It’s actually quite simple. The fields that state “Address While In The United States” and “Travel Information” are not mandatory. So, the simplest way is to fill out the form on the ESTA website and leave those items blank. If you are granted access rights with your request, your approval will not just be valid for one trip to the USA, but for all trips in the upcoming two years, without having to pay for additional requests. Depending on your travel frequency, this might just save you a bit of money.


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Categories : General

UPDATE! Contest: Get away to VMworld with Gestalt IT / Pay it forward!

5 08 2010

Some of you may have already read about the contest over at the Gestalt IT website, but I thought this contest was nice enough to give you an overview here and link back to the contest.

Now, I’m guessing that most of the folks reading here will be familiar with the event called VMworld, but for those that aren’t, here’s a short overview:

the annual VMworld gathering in San Francisco has become the central event for virtualization-related companies. Although focused on VMware, the conference draws many companies. And the labs and sessions are really awesome!

So, what is Gestalt IT doing? Because most people can’t afford to attend if their boss is not allowing them to go, Gestalt IT decided to set up a contest that will cover the following (if you should win):

  • One conference ticket.
  • One roundtrip air ticket from one of the major airports near you to SFO or another airport in the San Francisco area.
  • Three nights at a hotel within 1 mile of the Moscone Center in San Francisco (VMworld runs August 30 through September 2).

Now the final question would be what you need to do to enter, right? Well, we decided that VMworld was created for the community of VMware customers, users and partners. So, what we want to know from you is what you will do for our and/or your community by attending VMworld. Will you take notes from sessions and try to help people back home? Are you going to try and get some video interviews that will answer the burning questions your community may have? We want to know how you plan on “paying it forward”!

So, what are you waiting for? Get on over to the contest page to read all of the details and to enter the contest. We look forward to seeing your entries!

Update!

I received word that the contest has been extended. The winners will be announced Friday, August 13th. Yes, you read that right, winners. We were lucky enough to find some additional sponsors, which means that we will now give away two trips to VMworld. Check out the details here!

Also, a special thank you to Symantec and Xsigo for their help as a sponsor. And a thank you to two wonderful additional sponsors, Zetta and Veeam, that made it possible to pick two winners.


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Categories : VMware, VMworld

Shorts: What is it about cpuid.corespersocket on vSphere?

3 08 2010

Time for another short! The google searches leading to this blog show searches coming in based on the cpuid.corespersocket setting. In this short I’ll try to explain what this setting is for and how it behaves. So, let’s dig right in!

The cpuid.corespersocket setting

In a sense, you would assume that the name of the setting says it all. And in a sense, it does. In the physical world, you will have a number of sockets on your motherboard, this number of sockets is normally also the number of physical CPU’s that you have on said motherboard (at least in an ideal world), and each CPU will have one or more cores on it.

Wikipedia describes this in the following way:

One can describe it as an integrated circuit to which two or more individual processors (called cores in this sense) have been attached.

…..

The amount of performance gained by the use of a multi-core processor depends very much on the software algorithms and implementation. In particular, the possible gains are limited by the fraction of the software that can be parallelized to run on multiple cores simultaneously; this effect is described by Amdahl’s law. In the best case, so-called embarrassingly parallel problems may realize speedup factors near the number of cores, or beyond even that if the problem is split up enough to fit within each processor’s or core’s cache(s) due to the fact that the much slower main memory system is avoided.

Now, this sounds quite good, but some of you may ask what kind of influence this has on my virtualized systems. The most obvious answer would be “none at all”. This is because by default your virtualized system will see the cores as physical CPU’s and be done with it.

So, now you are probably wondering why VMware would even distinguish between cores and sockets. The answer is quite simple; It’s due to licensing. Not so much by VMware, but by the software or operating system that you would like to virtualize. You see, some of that software is licensed per core, and some will license by the number of sockets (some even combine the two).

So how do I use it?

As with all things computer related… It depends. When you are using ESX 3.5 you have no chance of using it. With ESX 4, you can actually use this feature, but it is not officially supported (someone please point me in the right direction if this is incorrect). And starting with ESX 4.1 the setting is now officially supported, and even documented in the VMware Knowledge Base as KB Article: 1010184.

Simply put, you can now create a virtual machine with for example 4 vCPU’s and set the cpuid.corespersocket to 2. This will make your operating system assume that you have two CPU’s, and that each CPU has two cores. If you create a machine with 8 vCPU’s and again select a cpuid.corespersocket of 2, your operating system will report 4 dual-core CPU’s.

You can actually set this value by either going this route:

  1. Power off the virtual machine.
  2. Right-click on the virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
  3. Click Hardware and select CPUs.
  4. Choose the number of virtual processors.
  5. Click the Options tab.
  6. Click General, in the Advanced options section.
  7. Click Configuration Parameters.
  8. Include cpuid.coresPerSocket in the Name column.
  9. Enter a value ( try 2, 4, or 8 ) in the Value column.

    Note: This must hold:

    #VCPUs for the VM / cpuid.coresPerSocket = An integer

    That is, the number of vCPUs must be divisible by cpuid.coresPerSocket. So if your virtual machine is created with 8 vCPUs, coresPerSocket can only be 1, 2, 4, or 8.

    The virtual machine now appears to the operating system as having multi-core CPUs with the number of cores per CPU given by the value that you provided in step 9.

  10. Click OK.
  11. Power on the virtual machine.

If the setting isn’t shown, for example for those who want to experiment with it under ESX 4.0, you can create the values in the following way:

  1. Power off the virtual machine.
  2. Right-click on the virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
  3. Click the Options tab.
  4. Click General, under the Advanced options section.
  5. Click Configuration Parameters.
  6. Click Add Row.
  7. Enter “cpuid.coresPerSocket” in the Name column.
  8. Enter a value ( try 2, 4, or 8 ) in the Value column.
  9. Click OK.
  10. Power on the virtual machine.

To check if your settings actually worked, you can use the sysinternals tool called Coreinfo on your Windows systems, and on Linux you can perform a simple “cat /proc/cpuinfo” to see if everything works.


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Categories : VMware, Virtualization, vSphere

Virtualization makes me say “Who cares about your hardware or operating system?!”

30 07 2010

When you come to think about it, people who work in the IT sector are all slightly nuts. We all work in an area that is notorious for trying to make itself not needed. When we find repetitive tasks, we try to automate them. When we have a feeling that we can improve something, we do just that. And by doing that, we try to remove ourselves from the equation where we possibly can. In a sense, we try to make ourselves invisible to the people working with our infrastructure, because a happy customer is one that doesn’t even notice that we are there or did something to allow him to work.

Traditional IT shops were loaded with departments that were responsible for storage, for networking, for operating systems and loads more. The one thing that each department has in common? They tried to make everything as easy and smooth as possible. Usually you will find loads of scripts that perform common tasks, automated installations and processes that intend to remove the effort from the admins.

In comes a new technology that allows me to automate even more, that removes the hassle of choosing the right hardware. That helps me reduce downtimes because of (un)planned maintenance. It also helps me reduce worrying about operating system drivers and stuff like that. It’s a new technology that people refer to as server virtualization. It’s wonderful and helps me automate yet another layer.

All of the people who are in to tech will now say “cool! This can help me make my life easier”, and your customer will thank you because it’s an additional service you can offer, and it helps your customer work. But the next question your customer is going to ask you is probably going to be something along the lines of “Why can’t I virtualize the rest?”, or perhaps even “Why can’t I virtualize my application?”. And you know what? Your customer is absolutely right. Companies like VMware are already sensing this, as can be read in an interview at GigaOM.

The real question your customer is asking is more along the lines of “Who cares about your hardware or operating system?!”. And as much as it pains me to say it (being a person who loves technology), it’s a valid question. When it comes to true virtualization, why should it bother me if am running on Windows, Unix, Mac or Linux? Who cares if there is an array in the background that uses “one point twenty-one jiggawatts” to transport my synchronously mirrored historic data back to the future?

In the long run, I as a customer don’t really care about either software or hardware. As a customer I only care about getting the job done, in a way that I expected to, and preferably as cheap as possible with the availability I need. In an ideal world, the people and the infrastructure in the back are invisible, because that means they did a good job, and I’m not stuck wondering what my application runs on.

This is the direction we are working towards in IT. It’s nothing new, and the concept of doing this in a centralized/decentralized fashion seem to change from decade to decade, but the only thing that remained a constant was that your customer only cared about getting the job done. So, it’s up to us. Let’s get the job done and try to automate the heck out of it. Lets remove ourselves from the equation, because time that your customer spends talking to you is time spent not using his application.


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Categories : GestaltIT, Virtualization, as a Service

How do you define high availability and disaster recovery?

7 07 2010

A while back I was on a call with someone who asked me the difference between high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR), saying that there are so many different solutions out there and that a lot of people seem to use the terminology but are unable to explain anything more about these two descriptions. So, here’s an attempt to demystify things.

First of all, let’s take a look at the individual terms:

High Availability:

According to Wikipedia, you can define availability in the following ways:

The degree to which a system, subsystem, or equipment is operable and in a committable state at the start of a mission, when the mission is called for at an unknown, i.e., a random, time. Simply put, availability is the proportion of time a system is in a functioning condition.

The ratio of (a) the total time a functional unit is capable of being used during a given interval to (b) the length of the interval.

And most online dictionaries seem to have a similar definition of availability. When we are talking about HA, we imply that we want the functioning condition of your system to be increased.

Going by the above you will also notice that there is no fixed definition of the availability. Simply put, it would mean that you need to put your own definition in place when talking about HA. You need to define what HA means in your environment. I’ve had customers that needed HA and defined this as the system having a certain amount of uptime, which is one way to measure it.

On the other hand you would be hard pressed if you were able to work with your system, but the data that you were working with was corrupted because one of your power users made an error during a copy job and wrote an older data set in the wrong spot. This would mean that your system is in itself available. You can log on to it, you can work with it, but the output you are going to get will be wrong.

To me, such a scenario would mean that your system isn’t available. After all, it’s not about everything being online. It’s about using a system in the way you would expect it to work. But when you ask most people in IT about availability, the first thing you will likely hear is something related to uptime or downtime. So, my tip to you is once again:

Define what “available” means to you and your organization/customer!

Disaster Recovery:

Natural disasterLet’s do the same thing as before and let’s turn to some general definitions. Wikipedia defines disaster the following way:

disaster is a perceived tragedy, being either a natural calamity or man-made catastrophe. It is a hazard which has comes to fruition. A hazard, in turn, is a situation which poses a level of threat to life, health, property, or that may deleteriously affect society or an environment.

And recovery is defined the following way (when it comes to health):

Healing, or Cure, the process of recovering from an injury or illness.

So, in a nutshell this is about bouncing back to your feet once a disaster strikes. Now again, it’s important to define what you would call a disaster, but at least there seems to be some sort of common understanding that anything that would get you back up and running after an entire site goes down, usually falls under the label of a DR solution.

It all boils down to definitions!

When you talk to other companies or vendors about HA and/or DR, you will soon notice that most have a different understanding of what HA and DR are. Your main focus should be to have a clear definition for yourself. Try to find out the importance and value of your solution and base your requirements on that. Ask yourself simple questions like for example:

  • What is the maximum downtime I can cope with before I need to start working again? 8 hours per year? 1 hour per year? 4 hours per month? What is my RPO and RTO
  • How do I handle planned maintenance? Can I bring everything down or do I need to distribute my maintenance across independent entities?
  • Can I afford the loss of any data at all? Can I afford the partial loss of data?
  • What if we see a city-wide power outage? Do I need a failover site, or are all my users in the same spot and won’t be able to work anyway?

Questions like these will help you realize that not everything you have running has the same value. Your development system with 6000 people working on it worldwide might need better protection than your productive system that is only being used by 500 people spread through the Baltic region.

Or in short.

Knowing what kind of protection you need is key. Fact is that both HA and DR solutions never come cheap. If you need the certainty that your solution is available and able to recover from a disaster, you will notice that the price tag will quickly skyrocket. Which is another reason to make sure that you know exactly what kind of protection you need, and creating that definition is the most important starting point. Once you have your own definition, make sure that you communicate those definitions and requirements so that all parties are on the same page. It should make your life a little easier in the end.


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Categories : GestaltIT, High Availability

It’s all about change and passion

28 06 2010

Some of you who read the title of this post will already have a hunch what this is all about. Heraclitus seems to be the person who first stated:

Nothing endures but change.

And I can only agree with that. I remember reading a post from Nick Weaver about an important change in his professional life, and I love this quote:

By taking this position I am intentionally moving myself from the top man on the totem pole to the lowest man on the rung.

And I think that most people who have read Nick’s blog know that this wasn’t entirely the truth, especially when looking what he was able to do until now.

Well, Nick can be assured now. There’s actually on person on the team that is “lower on the rung”. That person would be me.

Time for a change!

I am joining EMC and taking on the role of vSpecialist, or as my new contract says “Technical Consultant VCE”.

I am also going to be leaving my comfort zone and leave a team of people behind that have been great to work with. I have been working at SAP for seven years now, and the choice to leave wasn’t easy. I was lucky enough to have worked with a multitude of technologies in an environment that was high paced and stressful, but very rewarding, and I want to thank all of my colleagues for making the journey interesting! Even so, it’s time for me to make a change.

I was lucky enough to get to know several people who already work in a similar role, and if there’s one thing that distinguishes them in my mind, then it would be the passion they have for their job. This was actually the main reason for me to make the switch to EMC. It’s not about making big bucks, it’s not about being a mindless drone in the Evil Machine Company or drinking the Kool-Aid, it’s about getting a chance to work with people that share a passion and are experts at what they do. It’s about the chance to prove myself and perhaps one day joining their ranks as experts.

So, while I wrap things up here at SAP, if all goes well I will be joining the vSpecialist team on October 1st, and hopefully you will bear with me while I find my way going through this change, and I do hope you drop by every now and then to read some new posts from me.

See you on the other side!


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Categories : Cisco, EMC, General, VMware

Shorts: How to set up your BlackBerry as a UMTS/GPRS modem on Snow Leopard with T-Mobile in Germany

11 06 2010

After being on the road in a high speed train without any WLAN connection, I decided to do some searching on how to set up my BlackBerry as modem. Since the current firmware on my BlackBerry 9700 seems to have a somewhat flaky Bluetooth stack (currently I’m running on firmware v5.0.0.545) I wanted to do this via USB, but most of the settings should be the same for a device connected via Bluetooth.

One note should be made, and that is that I set this up for a connection on T-Mobile Germany, so the settings are most likely different for your provider, but this might give you a rough idea on how to set up everything. So let’s get started:

  • Start by downloading the BlackBerry Desktop Software for Mac. Right now you should be able to get a copy of it right here.
  • Install the software and connect your BlackBerry to it. The steps here should be pretty self explanatory.
  • Now, open your network preferences. To do so, go to “System Preferences” and click on “Network”, which can be found in the row with the header “Internet & Wireless”.
  • You should find a new device there called “RIM Composite Device”. If it’s not there, click on the plus sign at the lower left, and select the “RIM Composite Device” from the “Interface” drop down list. You can give it any name, for example “BlackBerry USB Internet Connection” might be a name that gives you a better idea of what this is. Then click on the “create” button.
  • Now, for the telephone number you will enter “*99#” (without the quotes). If you were setting up dial-in info on your BlackBerry, you would also use this as the dial-in number, and you would need to alter the number to tell your smartphone about the APN it should use. You could enter “*99*1#” or “*99***1#,” to force it to use the first APN, or you could use “*99*4#” or “*99***4#,” to make it use the fourth entry. But in my case I just went with the first one and used the short form of “*99#”.
  • You can enter anything you want as a user name and password, but the fields can not be left blank. I used “tm” in my setup.
  • Once you have done that, you can click on the “Advanced” button and go to the tab “Modem”. There, change the “Vendor” to “Research in Motion”, and select “Blackberry IP Modem (CDMA)” as the model.
  • Leave the CID as it is (it should be “1″), and enter “internet.t-mobile” or “dynamic” as the APN.
  • Click on the tab “DNS” and enter “193.254.160.1″ as the DNS server.
  • Go to the tab “PPP” and deselect all of the checks.
  • Now, click on “OK” and after that select “Save”.

Now, you should be able to connect to the internet using your phone. You can check the “Show modem in status in menu bar” to have a small phone symbol at the top menu bar to make it easier to track the status of your connection, and make it slightly easier to connect and disconnect your connection.

Two small notes to finish up this short. One, these are the settings that worked for me. If you are not in Germany, it’s likely that you would need to change the APN, DNS server and username/password to correspond with the carrier you are using. Also, it is possible that some of the settings made under “PPP” could be different and the connections still works. These are just my settings that I wanted to share.

Second, check your data plan!. Surfing via your phone is no problem once you get the connection up and running, but your data usage may accumulate quicker than you initially thought, and exceeding the amount of data in your plan could get expensive really quickly.

Last but not least: Let me know if this works for you, or if it doesn’t and you managed to get it working in a different way, let me know about it and I’ll make sure that I update the post.


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Categories : Apple, General, OSX

My “Follow, even if it’s not Friday” list

27 05 2010

There’s a meme on Twitter that can be witnessed each Friday. It’s called “Follow Friday” and can be found by searching for the #FollowFriday hash tag, or sometimes just simply abbreviated to #FF to save on space in a tweet.

Problem with a lot of those follow Friday tweets is that most of the time you have no idea why you are being given the advice to follow these people. If you are lucky you will see a remark in the tweet saying why you want to follow someone, or why I should follow all of these people, but in most cases it’s a matter of clicking on a person, going to their time line and hope that you can find a common denominator that gives you an indication of why you want to follow someone.

In an attempt to do some things differently, I decided to create this post and list some of the folks that I think are worth following. And I’ll try and add a description of what someone (or a list of people) do that make them worth following in my opinion. And if you are not on this list please don’t be offended, I will try to update it every now and then, but it would be impossible for me to pick out every single one of you on the first attempt.

So here goes nothing! I’m starting off this post with people that offer a great deal of info on things related to VMware, and I will try to follow up with other topics as time goes buy. Check back every now and then to see some new people to follow.

Focus on VMware:

  • @sakacc – Besides being the VP for the VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, Chad is still a true geek and is a great source of knowledge when it comes to things VMware and EMC. Also, very helpful in regards to try and help people who have questions in those areas. Be sure to check out his blog as it is a great source of information!
  • @Kiwi_Si – Simon is a great guy, and can tell you a lot about VMware and home labs. Because of the home labs he is also very strong when it comes to finding out more about HP’s x86 platform, and once again I highly recommend reading his TechHead blog.
  • @alanrenouf – This French sounding guy is actually hiding in the UK and is considered by many to be a PowerCLI demi-god. Follow his tweets and you will find out why people think of him that way.
  • @stevie_chambers – You want to find out more about Cisco UCS? Steve is the man to follow on Twitter, also for finding out more about UCS combined with VMware.
  • @DuncanYB – Duncan started the Yellow Bricks blog, which emphasizes on all things VMware, and also is a great source of info on VMware HA.
  • @scott_lowe – Scott is an ace when it comes to VMware.
  • @jtroyer – John is the online evangelist and enterprise community builder at VMware. For anything new regarding VMware and it’s community you should follow John.
  • @lynxbat – I would call it something else, but Nick is a genius. He started tweaking the EMC Celerra VSA and has worked wonders with it. I highly recommend following him!
  • @jasonboche – Virtualization evangelist extraordinaire. Jason has the biggest home lab setup that I know of, I’d like to see someone trump that setup.
  • @gabvirtualworld – Gabrie is a virtualization architect and has a great blog with lot’s of resources on VMware.
  • @daniel_eason – Daniel is an architect for a large British airline and knows his way around VMware quite well, but is also quite knowledgeable in other areas.
  • @SimonLong_ – With a load of certifications and an excellent blog, Simon is definitely someone to follow on Twitter.

Focus on storage:

  • @StorageNerve – Devang is the go-to-guy on all things EMC Symmetrix.
  • @storageanarchy – Our friendly neighborhood storage anarchist is known to have an opinion, but Barry is also great when it comes to finding out more about EMC’s storage technology.
  • @valb00 – Val is a great source of info on things NetApp, and you can find a lot of good retweets with useful information from him.
  • @storagebod – If you want someone to tell it to you like it is, you should follow Martin.
  • @Storagezilla – Mark is an EMC guy with great storage knowledge. Also, if you find any videos of him cursing, tell me about it because I could just listen to him go on and on for hours with that accent he has.
  • @nigelpoulton – Nigel is the guy to talk to when you want to know more about data centre, storage and I/O virtualisation. He’s also great on all areas Hitachi/HDS.
  • @esignoretti – If you are (planning on) using Compellent storage, be sure to add Enrico to your list.
  • @chrismevans – The storage architect, or just Chris, knows his way around most storage platforms, and I highly recommend you read his blog for all things storage, virtualization and cloud computing.
  • @HPStorageGuy – For all things related to HP and their storage products you should follow Calvin.
  • @ianhf – “Don’t trust any of the vendors” is almost how I would sum up Ian’s tweets. Known to be grumpy at times, but a great source when it comes to asking the storage vendors the right questions.
  • @rootwyrm – As with Ian, rootwyrm also knows how to ask hard questions. Also, he isn’t afraid to fire up big Bertha to put the numbers to the test that were given by a vendor.
  • @sfoskett – Stephen is an original blogger and can probably be placed under any of the categories here. Lot’s of good information and founder of Gestalt IT
  • @Alextangent – The office of the CTO is where Alex is located inside of NetApp. As such you can expect deep technical knowledge on all things NetApp when you follow him.
  • @StorageMojo – I was lucky to have met Robin in person. A great guy working as an analyst, and you will find refreshing takes and articles by following his tweets. A definite recommendation!
  • @mpyeager – Since Matthew is working for IT service provider Computacenter, he has a lot of experience with different environments and has great insight on various storage solutions as well as a concern about getting customers more bang for their buck.

Focus on cloud computing:

  • @Beaker – Christofer Hoff is the director of Cloud & Virtualization Solutions at Cisco and has a strong focus on all things cloud related. His tweets can be a bit noisy, but I would consider his tweets worth the noise in exchange for the good info you get by following him. Oh, and by the way… Squirrel!!
  • @ruv – Reuven is one of the people behind CloudCamp and is a good source of information on cloud and on CloudCamp.
  • @ShlomoSwidler – Good cloud stuff is being (re)tweeted and commented on by Shlomo.

So, this is my list for now, but be sure to check back every once in a while to see what new people have been added!

Created: May 27th 2010
Updated: May 28th 2010 – Added storage focused bloggers
Updated: July 23rd 2010 – Added some storage focused bloggers and some folks that center on cloud computing
Updated:


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Categories : General, Networking, Storage, Virtualization

Shorts: Trouble with symapi_db.bin causing erratic behavior

26 05 2010

Usually when you are connected to a EMC Symmetrix array you will install the Solutions Enabler package on your system. Solutions Enabler is basically both a set of tools to help you manage your Symmetrix arrays, as well as an API. The Solutions Enabler basically creates a small database that displays what Symmetrix arrays are connected to the host you are running the software on, the so called SYMAPI database that you will find as a file on your system called “symapi_db.bin”.

Under a normal situation you will run a discover process to initially scan and fill the database with entries. To do that you can issue the command:

symcfg discover

This will start the scan operation, and depending on the amount of arrays and the configuration on those arrays you can plan anywhere from just under a minute for a scan up to several minutes. Once the file has been created you could try opening the file and searching for strings inside of the file, and you will find a lot of information about devices, device paths, disk IDs and lot’s more.

Now, in some situations after your array configuration has changed, it is useful to refresh the database file. Under normal circumstances this should all be easily done and without any issues.

However, in some cases your database file might be facing problems, without manifestation in any obvious ways. I have seen cases where new devices would simply not show up. Other examples are error messages about disks that can not be reached because of access control list errors.

If you happen to have some erratic behavior on one of your hosts, you might want to try one thing before creating a service request in Powerlink. You might want to try creating a copy of your database, removing it and then performing a new discover. Some steps to help you do just that:

  • Create a backup of your device and/or composite groups using the symdg/symcg commands.
  • Rename your old symapi_db.bin to something else.
  • Issue a “symcfg discover” to create a new symapi_db.bin
  • Import your device and/or composite groups from the backup file(s) you created.

This won’t help you in all situations, but it helped me solve several cases were we were seeing erratic behavior on our hosts, and it might do the trick for you.


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Categories : EMC, Storage, Symmetrix

Something fun. The Linux alternative to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”

19 05 2010

I was talking to some colleagues this morning and I mentioned a parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Rave”. Since my colleagues didn’t know this poem existed, I figured there might be more people out there that are not aware of it, and I like what they did. So without any further ado I present to you:

The Penguin – by Rob Flynn and Jeramey Crawford

Once upon a term’nal dreary, while I hack’ed, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten code–
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a beeping,
As of some one gently feeping, feeping using damn talk mode.
“‘Tis some hacker,” I muttered, “beeping using damn talk mode–
Only this. I hate talk mode.”

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak semester,
And college life wrought its terror as the school year became a bore.
Eagerly I wished for privledges;–higher access I sought to borrow
For my term’nal, unceasing sorrow–sorrow for a file called core–
For the rare and radiant files of .c the coders call the core–
Access Denied. Chown me more.

“Open Source,” did all mutter, when, with very little flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Penguin of the saintly days of yore.
Quite a bit obese was he; having eaten lots of fish had he,
But, by deign of Finnish programmer, he sat in the middle of my floor–
Looking upon my dusty term’nal in the middle of my floor–
Came, and sat, and nothing more.

Then the tubby bird beguiling my sad code into shining,
By the free and open decorum of the message that it bore,
“Though thy term’nal be dusty and slow,” he said, “Linux be not craven!”
And thus I installed a new OS far from the proprietary shore–
The kernel code open but documentation lacking on this shore.
Quoth the Penguin, “pipe grep more!”

Much I marvelled this rotund fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning–little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help believing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird in the middle of his floor–
Bird or beast sitting in the middle of his cluttered floor,
With such instructions as “pipe grep more.”

But the Penguin, sitting lonely in that cluttered floor, spoke only
Those words, as if its soul in that instruction he did outpour.
Nothing more did he need utter; understood did I among that clutter–
Understood his command as I could scarcely do a few moments before–
I typed as furious as was willed me, understanding just a minute before.
Again the bird said “pipe grep more!”

“Amazing!” said I, “Penguin we will conquor the world if you will!
By the Network that interconnects us–by that Finn we both adore–
We’ll take this very world by storm!” For now grasped I what he’d meant,
The thing I do while searching
/usr/doc/* for that wond’rous lore–
Those compendiums of plaintext documentation and descriptive lore.
Quoth the Penguin, “pipe grep more!”

And the Penguin, never waddling, still is sitting, still is sitting
In the middle of my room and still very cluttered floor;
And his eyes have all the seeming of the free beer I am drinking
And the term’nal-light o’er him glowing throws his shadows on the floor;
And this OS from out the shadows that is pow’ring my term’nal on the floor
Shall be dominating–”Pipe grep more!”


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