Tonight I found myself recovering a VM on a Windows 2008 R2 cluster connected to an MD3000i SAN. To make very long and painful story short, it appears that someone applied a series of Windows Updates and then a Dell DSM update that screwed up the multipathing.… [ Continue reading ]
Category: hardware
Fun with PIX, Part Deux
After getting my PIX to boot in my previous post, I decided to run through the password recovery procedures.
What you’ll need:
- PIX recovery images (availble from either the Cisco site individually or here in one ZIP file)
- PIX firewall software version
- TFTP server software (I used the TFTP server included in the PacketTrap pt360 Suite in this exercise)
- Terminal Emulator (I typically use PuTTY)
Steps:
- Connect Ethernet 0 on the PIX to your local LAN.
Fun with PIX, Part I
When meeting with a potential customer the other day, she mentioned that she had a running PIX with an unknown password.
I thought I’d refresh my PIX skills and decided to bust out an old PIX 506E we had sitting in the office.… [ Continue reading ]
How to Expand a Virtual Disk on the Dell MD3000i
I recently found myself in the position of having to expand a virtual disk on a Dell MD3000i. The Dell MD3000i is a great entry-point SAN, but the GUI lacks some of the functions that you think would be there (such as online volume growth).… [ Continue reading ]
Installing Data Protection Manager 2007 on a Dell NX3000
Dell has this great NAS device that runs Windows 2008 Storage Server Standard–the NX3000. The only problem is that Dell treats it like an “appliance,” meaning you can’t partition it the way you want. I recently ordered two with 6x1TB drives and wanted to deploy DPM to them.… [ Continue reading ]
Troubleshooting 0xc0190036 Errors on Windows Vista / Windows 2008
This morning, I found myself in the unfortunate circumstance of the dreaded 0xc0190036 error. There is not a lot of information about this particular error code. It is, in fact, related to inaccessible or corrupt files.… [ Continue reading ]
Erratic or Negative Ping Times in Hyper-V Guests
A customer approached me with a some puzzling issues. They noticed a bunch of 1053 and 1054 Userenv errors in their event logs on their virtual machines. 1053 and 1054 error messages have very similar wording:
1053 – Windows cannot determine the user or computer name.… [ Continue reading ]
Optimizing Exchange Disk Performance with Diskpart
Since a lot of folks (myself included) are still running a lot of Exchange 2003 in the enterprise, I though I would post a bit about setting the track alignment properly in various kinds of storage.… [ Continue reading ]
How Window Autotuning breaks with Check Point SmartDefense
All That’s Unholy with Check Point SmartDefense
A few months ago, I ran into a problem when copying large files between two tiers of a network in one of our datacenters. I was doing a hardware upgrade on some Hyper-V hosts in a DMZ and was copying the images to a backup server while I swapped out hardware components in the Hyper-V hosts.… [ Continue reading ]