The Tech Journal

HP MSA20 – Extend and Transform Time Estimates

Jan 262012

Well, for all you people out there considering extending your MSA20 RAID Array or transforming the RAID type, but are concerned about how long it will take…

I recently added a 250GB drive to a RAID5 array consisting of 9 X 250GB disks. Adding another 250GB disk to the RAID 5 array, took less then 8 hours (it actually could have been WAY less) to add the drive. Extending the logical partition took no time at all.

One thing I do have to caution though, I did a test transformation converting a RAID 5 array to a RAID 6. It started off going fast, once it hit 25% it sat there, only increasing 1% every 1-2 days. After 4 days I finally killed the transformation. PLEASE NOTE: There is a chance this may have had to do with a damaged drive, and I think that may have had something to do with the issue. This will need further testing. Also, just so you are aware, you CANNOT cancel a transformation. I stopped mine by simply turning off the unit, and ALL data was destroyed. If you start a transformation, you NEED to let it complete.

ALWAYS insure you have a COMPLETE backup before doing these types of things to a RAID array!

Brother MFC-9840CDW – Extend Toner Life (More like squeeze the last little bit out)

Printers 16 Responses »

Dec 102011

Sick and tired of “Toner Low”, “Prepare New Toner Cartridge”, or even “Toner End of Life”?

Here’s a little hack for you people out there who have a Brother MFC-9840CDW and want to squeeze a few more copies out of your toner cartridges. Keep in mind, this can probably void your warranty so do it at your own risk.

This works on both standard, and high-yield toner cartridges.

There are two components to this: 1) The hardware aspect: There is a laser or something that shoots through a clear plastic seethrough circle (on both sides) of the toner. 2) The software aspect: The toner counter has to be reset.

Let’s get to it:

Hardware

Remove the toner tray and remove a single toner cartridge. On the either side of the toner cartridge you should see a clear plastic circle that should have traces of the color of the toner possibly on it. PLEASE NOTE: This is located on the side of the toner cartridge, don’t mess with anything else. Simply tear a small peice of paper and put some tape on the back, and slap it on the clear plastic. You only need to do this on one side per cartridge. This will fool the printer in to thinking that physically the toner has ink in it.

Software

I could be wrong, but the printer recognizes whether or not your using a standard or high-yield toner cartridges and keeps track of how many pages you print, and how much ink you use. You will need to reset this to clear the “Toner End of Life” message which stops you from printing. First you need to cover the toner holes as mentioned above in “Hardware”. Then you can proceed with this.

Open the front of the machine (as if you were wanting to get access to the toner cartridges). Now hit the “Clear/Back” button. This will open a secret menu on the front of the printer. Depending on whether you are using Standard to High Yield cartridges, you will want to use the menu to reset the counters for the applicable toner cartridges. There is 2 options (one for standard, and one for high yield) for each color of cartridge.

After this, you should be able to print again!

Astaro Security Gateway v8 installed on v7 VM appliance – Issue with Networking “flexible” adapter

Astaro, ESXi, Internet, Security, VMware, vSphere 4 Responses »

Nov 282011

Just thought I’d do up a quick little post about an issue I’ve been having for some time, and just got it all fixed.

I’ve been running Astaro Security Gateway inside of a VMware environment for a few years. When version 8.x came out, I went ahead and simply attached the ISO to the VM and re-installed over the old v7 and restored the config. This worked great, and for the longest time I had no real issues.

I noticed from time to time that with packet sniffs, there was quite a few retransmissions and TCP segments lost. This didn’t really pose any issues, and didn’t cause any problems, however it was odd.

Recently, I had to configure a Site to Site IPsec VPN between my office, and one of my employees to provide exchange, VoIP, etc… With astaro this is fairly easy, few clicks and it should work simple, however I started noticing huge issues with file transfers, whether being transferred over SMB (Windows File Sharing), or SCP/SSH. Transfers would either completely halt when started, transfer a few couple hundred kilobytes, or transfer half of the file until it would simply halt and become unresponsive.

After 3-4 days of troubleshooting, I went ahead and did a packet sniff, noticed there were numerous TCP segments lost, fragmentation, etc… Initially I beleive that maybe MTU configuration may have had something to do with it, however TCP/IP and the Astaro device should have taken care of properly setting the MTU on the IPsec automatically.

After trying fresh installs of ASG, etc… and no behaviour change, I finally decided to take a few days away and give it a shot later. I’ve troubleshot this from every avenue and for some reason the issue is still existing. I finally figured that the only thing I haven’t checked was with my VMware vSphere environment. Checked the settings, all was good, however I did notice that the NICs for the ASG vm (which were created by the v7 appliance) were set as flexible, and inside of the VM were detected as some type of AMD network adapter. I found this odd.

After shutting down the ASG VM, removing the NICs and configuring new ones using E1000, all of a sudden the issue was fixed, the IPsec Site to Site VPN functioned properly, and all the network issues seen in network captures were resolved.

I hope this helps some other people who may be frustrated dealing with the same issue.

Update: Shaw Business Internet 100 Plus

Internet No Responses »

Nov 022011

Well it’s been a few months and love it!

Here’s a little speedtest.net snippet:

Download: 93.89Mb/s

Upload: 4.83Mb/s

Ping: 12ms

Keep in mind I need the connection mostly for upload. I’ve actualy gone over 5Mbps plenty of times. Can’t wait for their 250 plus offering, or even better yet FTTP.

How To and Guide (Updated): Get Lio-Target running on CentOS 6

iSCSI, Linux, Storage, VMware, vSphere 46 Responses »

Oct 142011

In this tutorial, I will be showing you how to get Lio-Target (an iSCSI target that is compatible with persistent reservations required by both VMware and MS Clustering) running on CentOS 6.

While this tutorial is targetted for CentOS 6 users, I see no reason why this should work on any other newer distributions.

Please note that while Lio-Target 4.x (and required tcm_loop and iSCSI) is available on newer/non-stable development kernels, Lio 3.X is stable, and currently builds nicely on CentOS 6. I will be doing up a tutorial for Lio 4.X once I myself start using it.

One more note, In the past I have thrown up a few tutorials on how to get Lio-Target running on various Linux distributions. These tutorials have worked for some, and not for others. I myself have had a few difficulties replicating the success I did originally. I myself am a technical guy, I do not understand some developer terms, and am not an expert in understanding some development cycles. This is one of the reasons why I had so many difficulties earlier. Since the earlier tutorials, I have caught up to speed and am familiar with what is required to get Lio-Target running.

Now on to the tutorial:

It is a good idea to start with a fresh install of CentOS 6. Make sure you do not have any of the iSCSI target packages installed that ship with CentOS. In my case I had to remove a package called something like “iSCSI-Target-utils” (This shipped with the CentOS 6 install).

1. Let’s download the software. We need to download both the 3.5 version of Lio-Target, along with Lio-utils which was built for 3.x of Lio-Target. (I chose the RisingTide Systems GIT repo since lio related projects have been missing from kernel.org’s GIT repo due to the issues kernel.org has been having recently).

Issue the following commands:

git clone git://risingtidesystems.com/lio-core-backports.git lio-core-backports.git

git clone git://risingtidesystems.com/lio-utils.git lio-utils.git

cd lio-utils.git/

git checkout --track -b lio-3.5 origin/lio-3.5

cd ..

(You have now downloaded both Lio-Target 3.5 backport, and lio-utils for lio-target 3.x)

2. Build kernel modules for your existing running CentOS kernel. Make sure you change in to the lio-core-backports directory first.

Change in to the lio-core-backports directory then issue the following commands:

make

make install

(You have now built, and installed the kernel modules for Lio-Target)

3. Build lio-utils and install. This is one of the tasks I had difficulties with, for some reason the install scripts were calling out to the incorrect python directory, I found a fix to this myself.

Apply the fix first:

Go into the tcm-py and lio-py directories inside of the lio-utils directory. Open the install.sh in both the tcm-py and lio-py directories and change the “SITE_PACKAGES” string to reflect the following:

SITE_PACKAGES=/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages

Remember to do this in both the install.sh files for lio-py and tcm-py. Now on to building and installing lio-utils.

Issue the following commands from the lio-utils directory:

make

make install

And you are now done!

Lio-Target and Lio-Utils have no succesfully been installed. As you can see, this was way easier than my previous tutorials, and doesn’t include and rebuilding of kernels, etc… One of the plus’s is that you actually build the kernel modules for the existing CentOS kernel.

One last thing. Start lio-target by issuing the command:

/etc/init.d/target start

And do a ‘dmesg’ to confirm that it started ok!

As always, feel free to post any comments or questions. I’ll do my best to help!

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