Archive for the ‘Work’ Category

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Non-HP harddrives in an HP MSA20

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

A customer asked me if it was possible to use non-hp drives in an HP MSA20 as they costed a lot less than HPs own drives. I honestly said that it would require a POF. The customer accepted the initial expense of single 1TB SATA drive.  I fired up hpacucli to figure out what was up and down on this

=> ctrl ch="mirror" show config detail
....
....
physicaldrive 1:1
Box: 1
Bay: 1
Status: OK
Drive Type: Data Drive
Interface Type: SATA
Size: 1000.2 GB
Firmware Revision: HPG1
Serial Number: 9QJ2B4GD
Model: HP GB1000EAFJL
SATA NCQ Capable: False

As HP does not make harddrives, but uses OEM drives with custom firmware I had to figure out what types of drives was in there. The easiest solution would be to shut the box down and pull out a drive to inspect. Having dealt with HP quite a lot, I know that they also remark the drives, so I would probably not be able to see what types of drives was in there, leaving me with guessing if I choose to go that route.

Instead I opted for figuring out what type of drive it was likely to be based on the firmware.  I googled a bit and found that the MSA20 could support up to 1TB disks. A bit more googling yielded this advisory from HP about upgrading firmware on Seagate drives to HPG6. Based on the age of the MSA20 in question, the age of the 1TB HP disks we already had in them, I decided it was most likely to be Baracuda 7200.11 drives that HP utilized for this and thus we ordered one of those.
Drive arrived. We put it in. Rescanned and lo and behold:

physicaldrive 1:6
Box: 1
Bay: 6
Status: OK
Drive Type: Data Drive
Interface Type: SATA
Size: 1000.2 GB
Firmware Revision: CC38
Serial Number:             9VP4D0ZA
Model: Seagate ST31000528AS
SATA NCQ Capable: False

A non-HP drive working. We have now placed an order for 19 x 1TB Seagate drives.

Your millage may wary if you try this. It is also worth mentioning that it would be an option to test non-seagate disks and/or bigger disks. Beware of the heat and power requirements though! HP themselves only sells the MSA20 with upto 1TB disks.

Finally for the record, it should be state that this was on an MSA20 with this firmware level:

MSA20 in mirror
 Bus Interface: SCSI
 Serial Number: PAAAC0PMQTR7V0
 Chassis Serial Number: E01RMLJ17M
 Chassis Name: mirror
 RAID 6 (ADG) Status: Enabled
 Controller Status: OK
 Chassis Slot: 2
 Hardware Revision: Rev A
 Firmware Version: 2.08
 Rebuild Priority: Medium
 Expand Priority: Medium
 Surface Scan Delay: 3 secs
 Cache Board Present: True
 Cache Status: OK
 Accelerator Ratio: 50% Read / 50% Write
 Drive Write Cache: Disabled
 Read Cache Size: 56 MB
 Write Cache Size: 56 MB
 Total Cache Size: 112 MB
 Chassis Slot 2 Battery Info
 Battery Pack Count: 2
 Battery Status: OK
 Host Bus Adapter Slot: Slot Unknown
 Host Bus Adapter Port: 1
 SATA NCQ Supported: False

Posted in Hardware Projects, Linux, Work | 2 Comments »

New job – Senior Operations Specialist in NNIT

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Well, then it happened.  I quit Telia. I will surely miss my colleagues which are among the smartest and most dedicated people in Denmark, but it was time to move on to new worlds.

I look forward to work for NNIT. A title of Senior is new to me. Let us see, if I can lift the burdens put onto my shoulders.

Posted in Work | No Comments »

Virtual interfaces under linux.

Friday, January 15th, 2010

As with other operating systems it is possible to bring multiple service ip-addresses online under one physical NIC under linux. This is just at brief howto on doing it.

ubuntu:

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces
# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
 address 192.168.1.2
 netmask 255.255.255.0
 network 192.168.1.0
 broadcast 192.168.1.255
 gateway 192.168.1.1
# The first virtual interface

auto eth0:1
iface eth0:1 inet static
 address 192.168.1.100
 netmask 255.255.255.0
 broadcast 192.168.1.255
 gateway 192.168.1.1

After you have edited that file, issue

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

RHEL (Redhat)/Centos:

cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
 sudo cp ifcfg-eth0 ifcfg-eth0:0
 sudo vi ifcfg-eth0:0

 cat ifcfg-eth0:0

 > DEVICE=eth0:0
 > BOOTPROTO=none
 > IPADDR=192.168.1.100
 >  NETMASK=255.255.255.0
 > GATEWAY=192.168.100
 > ONBOOT=yes

After that, issue

sudo service network restart

Posted in Linux, Unix, Work | No Comments »

Problems continuing calculations on using Schrödinger checkpoint files.

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

I recently helped identifying a problem with continuing calculations from a checkpoint file performed by desmond of the Schrödinger software portfolio. The error we got was

fail to extract simulation parameters from checkpoint file <filename>

It worked for a lot of people, but not for others. I searched high and low for differences:

  • Different unix environment settings.
  • Differnet MPI settings (intel mpi vs. gcc mpi vs. software mpi)
  • Different permission settings on home dirs
  • Differences in groupmembership between those who could continue calculations and those who couldn’t.
  • Performing the calculations on different nodes in the calculation clusters.

As it turned out it was neither of these points that was responsible for problems. Instead it was the use of non-english chars in the comment field in the /etc/password file for the users who could not continue the calculations from a checkpoint file. The fix for this is simple:

usermod -c "new name, only english chars" <userid>

Everything was fine after that.

Posted in Unix, Work | No Comments »

passwd problem on nis master

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

I was bitten lately by a problem of chaning passwords for users on a NIS master running RHEL 3. The actual error was

RPC: Can’t encode arguments
The password has not been changed on <nis master>.
passwd: Failed preliminary check by password service

I could not easily find anything on google about it. It took a while to figure out, so for reference I document my fix here. I merely removed the word ‘nis’ from /etc/pam.d/system-auth, and that seems to have solved the issue. It has worked previously with that word, so why it started to fail is beyond me, but who cares anyway.

Posted in Unix, Work | No Comments »

Linux (ubuntu Karmic Koala) on HP Elitebook 2530p

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

Finally got my new laptop (the old one served me well), an HP elitebook 2530p. I had my doubts on the ability to be able to get suppport for every piece of hardware in this laptop under Linux, but it was doable. Not without issues, but still fairly easy.

I opted for the latest ubuntu, Karmic Koala (9.10), which on the time of writting was release candidate. The installation went smoothly. The windows partition got resized without issues and after a few clicks on the next button the system was up and running. With encrypted ext4 filesystem and all.

Working without a hitch:

  • acpi (suspend, fan control, speedstep)
  • sound
  • graphic
  • wired network

Working with some debugging

  • Initially the wireless would not work with my wrt54g. It worked with other wifi hotspots. Symptoms were that the laptop could not a dhcplease from the router. Tried to flash the router with dd-wrt firmware instead of the tomato firmware. Did not help. Breakthrough came when I reset the router settings to “Default”. Then it worked with dd-wrt. I reflashed it with tomato and it still worked. So it is possible to enable “some setting” in the wrt54g router that cause problems with this laptop. My other laptops did not inhibit these issues. But then again. The laptop can not really be blamed.
  • My external Huawai E180 did not work. After some googling, it turned out to be a bug introduced in a specific kernel release.  The solution was to downgrade the kernel to a previous version. The only one available was 2.6.31-9-rt, which I choose and that works just fine.
  • The built-in Qualcomm Gobi 1000 3G module requires a firmware and a firmware loader to function. The firmware loader can be found here. It is just a little .c program and a set of udev rules. After that you will need the firmware. That can be obtained from your windows partition. If you do not have the driver for the windows environment it can be obtained from hp. The Gobi chipset is a fullblown arm cpu which can function as a 3G modem for various types of 3G nets. Different firmwares allows access to different networks. This piece of information gives an overiew. For my part I needed the 6. th version of the firmware as I live in Europe/Denmark.

All in all a couple of minor issues. I am really satisfied with this latop and the way Linux works on it. Will hopefully be a good laptop for me in the next couple of years.

Posted in Hardware Projects, Unix, Work | 2 Comments »

Sjælland Rundt 2009

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

Sammen med en del andre fra mit arbejde kørte vi sjælland rundt d. 3. Juli 2009. Det var en hård tur. Set i bakspejlet skulle jeg have haft trænet noget mere. Næste gang er jeg bedre forberedt :-)

Posted in Personal ramblings, Unix, Work | No Comments »

Veritas Cluster Server 5.0

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

Together with a fellow co-worker from Telia, I was on a 5 day course on Veritas Cluster Server 5.0 (for Solaris) at Symantec Education, Green Park, Reading/UK. Let me say that Veritas Cluster Server is almost as good as a cluster server could be. It was good taking 5 days of to play with VCS. In my day to day work I do not have the time to fool around, so being in a lab being able to fool around with non-production stuff was good. The actual training material from Veritas was good, but not more than that. The computers were slow (Sun blade 150s), there was to much time for the labs and the lab sessions was not advanced enough for Rene and I. Other students however, had their hands full, so I guess it is hard to balance the eduction so that all are satisfied.

The hotel was not interessting (by a long shot), but luckily Rene knew Søren, who was kind enough to show us where to eat in Reading 3 days during the stay. Thanks to him for taking the time to showing us these fine places in reading:

 Other than that, we was a trip to London and I got myself an iphone (on sale on O2 for 169 – guess the iphone 3G is being released real soon now ™.

Posted in Unix, Work | 1 Comment »

Certified in ITIL v3 foundation

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

The most important certification this year is mine to hold: “Foundation Certified in ITIL Service Management version 3″. Whooooaaaa. NOT!

Basically I went on the course because ITIL is a buzz word of the year and I wanted to see just what it was all about. Basically old stuff in new words. A lot of words actually. More than necessary! But then again. These courses sells like hot-cakes, so who can blame HP :-)

My score was 75%. Not execeptionally good, but who cares. I got the ITIL v3 pin. It can be bought on ebay a little later ;-)

Posted in Work | No Comments »

MC/SG course at HP

Friday, April 4th, 2008

I attended a MC/SG (Service Guard) cluster course at HP Denmark together with Peter this week. They get bonus points for provding good food, good fascilities, execelent tutor (Jan Bjørn). But while all of these bonus points add up, I can’t help being negative about the whole experience. MC/SG (11.17) is no match for the competition, not by a long shot.

But atleast Peter and I got the oppetunity to fool around with LVM, scripting, Service Guard and we got a lot of good info from Jan Bjørn on various unix related things. Which is good! So to sum up: There really is NOT more to Service Guard than what meets the eye, which in my view isn’t enough in 2008. But maybe the redesigned Service Guard (11.18) can change that.

Posted in Unix, Work | No Comments »

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