Best posts made by Shuey

Due to hurricane Matthew, our company shutdown all servers for two days.  One of the servers was an ESXi host with an attached HP StorageWorks MSA60.

When we logged into the vSphere client, we noticed that none of our guest VMs are available (they're all listed as "inaccessible").  And when I look at the hardware status in vSphere, the array controller and all attached drives appear as "Normal", but the drives all show up as "unconfigured disk".

We rebooted the server and tried going into the RAID config utility to see what things look like from there, but we received the following message:

"An invalid drive movement was reported during POST. Modifications to the array configuration following an invalid drive movement will result in loss of old configuration information and contents of the original logical drives".

Needless to say, we're very confused by this because nothing was "moved"; nothing changed.  We simply powered up the MSA and the server, and have been having this issue ever since.

I have two main questions/concerns:

1. Since we did nothing more than power the devices off and back on, what could've caused this to happen?  I of course have the option to rebuild the array and start over, but I'm leery about the possibility of this happening again (especially since I have no idea what caused it).

2. Is there a snowball's chance in hell that I can recover our array and guest VMs, instead of having to rebuild everything and restore our VM backups?

One word of warning I would interject: You have to be careful with Bcc's with certain bosses because some bosses aren't good at paying attention to details and won't even realize that they were included as a bcc instead of inline with the other recipient(s). This can increase the risk of more trouble vs less.

FOG ended up being just the ticket! It was easy to deploy, easy to configure, and I already had a base VM ready to go for image capture. Capturing and deploying the image was a breeze and took about 60 minutes total (not bad at all for the size of the base image and the speed of our infrastructure).

Thanks for taking me into giving it a try - it was well worth the time!

A collective "android dream", blending man and machine to create an artificial lifeform.

http://electricsheep.org/

I've been using this for over 10 years now, and I can still sit and watch it for long stints of time while listening to music. I noticed it wasn't talked about in the forums here, so I thought I'd share it for anyone who's never heard of it :).

When you first run it, it has to either generate sheep or you need to download and install sheep to get it up and running more quickly. There are some "sheep packs" available online for free, and I have a collection of the latest flocks that I'd be willing to upload if anyone wants about 50GB worth.

Oh dang!  I finally figured it out, but the solution was very counter-intuitive (at least from my perspective)!

I needed to first just connect one physical NIC to the management network, add the host to vCenter, then go into the vSwitch0 and change the "teaming and failover" options to "Route based on IP hash".  Then I went back into the DCUI and added the second nic that was part of trk1.  I was still able to ping the server and access it after rebooting.

What confused me about this process is that I'm used to only changing the vSwitch options AFTER the host is up and accessible.  But I could never get the host up and accessible with multiple NICs.

This was a good lesson learned the hard way.  I at least know now that I have to use one NIC initially, gain access to the teaming options, then add more NICs afterwards.

3 months ago: https://mangolassi.it/topic/10493/rackspace-bought-out-and-now-private/1

@scottalanmiller @dafyre Thanks guys! Scott told me about this site months ago, but I JUST NOW finally bit the bullet and signed up, lol.

I'm looking forward to learning a lot from all the great people and years of collective experience!

You guys are not going to believe this...

First I attempted a fresh cold boot of the existing MSA, waited a couple minutes, then powered up the ESXi host, but the issue remained. I then shutdown the host and MSA, moved the drives into our spare MSA, powered it up, waited a couple minutes, then powered up the ESXi host; the issue still remained.

At that point, I figured I was pretty much screwed, and there was nothing during the initialization of the RAID controller where I had an option to re-enable a failed logical drive. So I booted into the RAID config, verified again that there were no logical drives present, and I created a new logical drive (RAID 1+0 with two spare drives; same as we did about 2 years ago when we first setup this host and storage).

Then I let the server boot back into vSphere and I accessed it via vCenter. The first thing I did was removed the host from inventory, then re-added it (I was hoping to clear all the inaccessible guest VMs this way, but it didn't clear them from the inventory). Once the host was back in my inventory, I removed each of the guest VMs one at a time. Once the inventory was cleared, I verified that no datastore existed and that the disks were basically ready and waiting as "data disks". So I went ahead and created a new datastore (again, same as we did a couple years ago, using VMFS). I was eventually prompted to specify a mount option and I had the option of "keep the existing signature". At this point, I figured it'd be worth a shot to keep the signature - if things didn't work out, I could always blow it away and re-create the datastore again. After I finished the process of building the datastore with the keep signature option, I tried navigating to the datastore to see if anything was in it - it appeared empty. Just out of curiosity, I SSH'd to the host and checked from there, and to my surprise, I could see all my old data and all my old guest VMs! I went back into vCenter and re-scanned storage and refreshed the console, and all of our old guest VMs were there! I re-registered each VM and was able to recover everything! All of our guest VMs are back up and successfully communicating on the network.

I think most people in the IT community would agree that the chances of having something like this happen are extremely low to impossible.

As far as I'm concerned, this was a miracle of God...

Thanks for all the feedback guys! I got on a live chat this morning with xByte and will be getting a quote later today. Can't hurt to at least see what they have to offer and get a price ;).

Mr Oizo - Flat Beat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmsbP13xu6k

I've been administering a network that I took over about 4 years ago, and I'm at another hurdle that I need to figure out. We have a single Windows 2008 R2 server that currently acts as a DC, our cert server, and our SharePoint server (which has outside access configured so our staff can access it from home to check schedules for instance).

First let me say that I know nothing about certificate services, IIS or SQL (all three of which are currently configured and running on this server).

1. What I'd like to do is setup a new cert server (one that can either "take over" by simply becoming the "new cert server", or by migrating the info from the old server to the new / and I currently have no idea which of those scenarios is possible or best practice).

2. I'd also like to demote this server so it's no longer a DC (but from what I've read online so far, if a DC is also a cert server, demoting it can cause issues if the cert services aren't migrated or removed first).

3. Finally, I'd like to eventually build a new replacement SharePoint server, BUT, in the meantime, I was considering doing a P2V of what's left of this server (essentially just an old SharePoint server) that we can host in our current VMware infrastructure, and then I can re-purpose the hardware that it used to be hosted on. Replacing SharePoint will be another project all on its own, especially since I know nothing about SharePoint installation, configuration, etc.

I'm really excited to take on these projects! I just need to overcome some of my initial fears of what seem like scary projects since I'm so green in these areas. My initial research has been overwhelming, so I'm trying to take my time and tread carefully.

Any advice or direction is greatly appreciated!

Here's what they quoted me:

• R730XD-2CPU Dell PowerEdge R730xd Server ( 2 CPU Version) (1)
• Dell PowerEdge R730xd 3.5" Chassis with up to 12 Hard Drives (1)
• Intel E5-2609v3 1.9GHz/15M/1600MHz 6-Core 85W (2)
• Dell PE R730 Normal Heat Sink (2)
• Dell 4GB DDR4 Reg (4)
• PERC H730P Mini Mono Controller 2GB NV Cache (RAID 0/1/5/6/10/50/60) (1)
• Dell 4TB 3.5" 7.2K NL SAS 12Gbs HDD (10)
• Intel Ethernet I350 QP 1Gb Network Daughter Card (1)
• iDRAC8 Enterprise (1)
• Dell 2U Sliding Ready Rails (1)
• Dell 13th Gen 750W Redundant PSU (1)
• 5 Year Dell NBD Onsite Warranty (1)

Total: $6,152.00

So my question, I think, is how do we:

• Catalogue the knowledge needed for IT? I know of this done, literally, nowhere.
• Create a path or curriculum for learning these things?
• Create a means to present comprehensive basic, foundational IT knowledge?

Very valid points and questions, but in today's "IT age", even if we could catalog and/or collect all of this info into one place, it could still take years to review and learn from it, especially for "beginners". IT has become so vast and diverse that it's impossible for a true "renaissance man" to exist; nobody can "know it all".

It's unfortunate that someone with SAM's experience level and understanding could ever be seen as "stupid" for not knowing one little thing in a sea of information, but in general, that's one of the coolest things about IT: because it's so vast, "masters" always have an opportunity to learn things from beginners.

@scottalanmiller said in Migrate and/or replace old cert server?:

@Shuey said in Migrate and/or replace old cert server?:

Before Hyper-V was ever introduced on this server, it was and still is a Windows Server 2008 R2 server. They installed Windows Server 2008 R2 on a bare-metal ProLiant. Then, after several months of having the server running as a DC, SharePoint, a cert server and a file server, they decided that they wanted to make it a VM host as well, so they installed the Hyper-V role and built some VMs inside the Hyper-V console.

What you are calling the "Hyper-V Console" is a VM. You are describing the standard "poor" way to install Hyper-V. It doesn't matter how Hyper-V gets installed, a type 1 hypervisor is a type 1 hypervisor. That "console" is a VM on top of Hyper-V. Hyper-V cannot run on top of Windows, it's physically impossible. This is the most common myth around Hyper-V and there are hundreds of posts on SW correcting this.

It's also often listed as the #2 reason (after licensing) that people are confused about Hyper-V and why we used to say that all Hyper-V deployments were caused by confusion.

When you install the "role" of Hyper-V, it takes the previous bare metal Windows install, packages it into a VM, installs Hyper-V beneath it.

Oh snap! I had no idea! I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.... So there's never an instance where someone installs Server 2008 on a physical box, and then later adds the Hyper-V role? You HAVE to build a bare-metal Hyper-V box first and install your server OS in it BEFORE you can then add the Hyper-V role?

update Oh, I just re-read your post. It takes the previous bare-metal WINDOWS install, and turns THAT into a VM!

@Shuey said in Migrate and/or replace old cert server?:

Something I've not been able to verify: Is it safe to demote the DC before backing up and/or migrating the cert services? If so, I'm going to demote it and do the V2V. This will still give me time to chip away at the cert side of this project while also being able to re-purpose the old hardware.

Looks like I found my answer to this portion:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/d922860b-c8cd-4ed5-9b0b-05391c18afc0/demoting-a-domain-controller-with-a-ca-on-it?forum=winserversetup

I don't have the space for a "lab" anymore, but here is what mine looked like way back between 2003 to around 2008:
Full gallery: http://shuey.deviantart.com/gallery/454063/Home-Network

A couple shots from the gallery:

I happened to be backing up the netlogon logs from our domain controllers when I noticed an issue from one of our DCs. When I run "nltest /query" from a CMD prompt, I get the following results:

Flags: 0
Connection Status = 1311 0x51f ERROR_NO_LOGON_SERVERS
The command completed successfully

I verified the other 5 DCs and the command returns 0x0 NERR_Success on all of them except for this one.

I tried restarting the Netlogon service, but the error persisted. I then did a reboot of the server, and tested again after it came back up; the results were 0x0 NERR_Success. I noticed that the log file had more info than I wanted to see (I normally only want to see info like this: 10/13 06:16:37 LAKEIMAGING: NO_CLIENT_SITE: 3RD-HR2 192.168.210.250); there was way more verbosity than that. So I ran "nltest /dbflag:0x0" and restarted the netlogon service. Afterwards, I tested again with "nltest /query" and I am getting the same error as before (1311)!! I can't figure out what is causing this or how to fix it permanently!

Everything is still looking good!

@thwr said in Synergy - Software KVM:

Pretty cool. Does it run on ARM? Can't find anything about supported platforms in the FAQ.

Here's a couple of links that may or may not help
https://github.com/symless
https://github.com/symless/synergy-android-cyanogen
https://learn.adafruit.com/synergy-on-raspberry-pi/intro-what-is-synergy (this one mentions that a version IS available for ARM, but may not quite be up to snuff yet)

@Dashrender said in How Do So Many People in IT Not Know What a Database Is?:

@RojoLoco said in How Do So Many People in IT Not Know What a Database Is?:

A database is the plastic feet under my desktop PC, right?

Wait, you mean the harddrive?

No, you must mean the "modem", right? Wait... now I'm confusing myself... the screen thingy on the desktop is the computer, isn't it?