System Administration

Labels Should Not Be Affixed To Removable Parts

by

Once upon a time, in a data center not far away, a lone system administrator took the front bezels off several identical machines. Upon completing the work, this individual discovered that the labels for those machines were on the bezels themselves, making it difficult to tell which machines the bezels belonged to. Shortly thereafter, this lone system administrator configured the front display of those particular Dell servers to display the machine name, thereby solving this problem for himself and retaining the use of the bezels, because they’re pretty. Once upon a longer time ago, in a data center slightly farther away, a lone system administrator added a network interface card to one of his hosts. In doing this he removed …

Read More

8 Hints For Using DNS More Effectively

by

“We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection.” – Butler Lampson 1. DNS is a hierarchy. Use it to show logical groupings. Fully-qualified domain names (FQDNs) like pussinbootsthemovie.com are great examples of what happens when you don’t take advantage of the hierarchy in DNS. Wouldn’t pussinboots.dreamworks.com be just as easy? Or, frankly, just avoid the issue and do what Disney does: http://disney.com/cars/. What if all your company’s desktops were in .desktop.company.com? Would that help assign permissions to them? Or your engineering group had all their stuff in .eng.company.com? Test hosts in .test.company.com? Would having all your services at your DR site in .dr.company.com help to manage, monitor, and use them? I’m not saying that any of …

Read More

How to Set or Change a Dell PowerEdge Service Tag

by

Got a Dell PowerEdge that you replaced the motherboard on, and now it doesn’t have a service tag? Reset it with the asset.com tool, which I’ve conveniently packaged as both a floppy disk image and an ISO for those of us in need. They both use the Windows 7 boot disk DOS and asset_A209.com from ftp.dell.com (renamed to asset.com). Dell Asset and Service Tag.IMA Dell Asset and Service Tag.ISO Once you boot from these you can set the service tag with: asset /s <service tag> You can also set the asset tag with: asset <asset tag> Or clear the asset tag with: asset /d Have fun! Standard disclaimer: your mileage may vary, and while I’m not actively trying to be …

Read More

The Easiest Way To Update A Dell Server's Firmware

by

With the advent of VMware ESXi there are fewer and fewer good ways to update your Dell PowerEdge system’s firmware, seeing as you can’t just run the System Update Utility from the console OS anymore. Making things more difficult, I think I’ve seen every failure mode Dell’s iDRAC has to offer, from the inability to log into a local repository via FTP when the password has special characters to persistent errors like “Return code mismatch on iDracWrapper.efi” that completely block the updating process. My journey might have been full of pain and thoughts of other vendors but it’s yielded what I think is the single best way of updating Dell firmware: using the Dell Repository Manager to create a bootable, …

Read More

Xangati Webinar Tomorrow – Still Have Some Room

by

If you’ve been thinking about blame in your organization, looking at Xangati’s tools (or wanting some good reasons why you should look at them), and want to be part of a good conversation, you should join Brian, Nathanael, and myself for tomorrow’s “Stop the Virtualization Blame Game” webinar. We’re going to talk a lot about how blame happens, why all the different silos within IT feel left out, and what to do about it. The turnout is looking great, but there’s still some room for more. Sign up now! It starts at 10 AM Pacific / 11 AM Mountain / 12 PM Central / 1 PM Eastern.

Excuses

by

So I’ve been writing a lot on Blame, Understanding Blame, and Preventing Blame over the last two weeks, and my thoughts have inspired some good discussion. Vendors have even gotten into it, with Xangati and I teaming up for a webinar next Thursday, February 24th to talk about blame and ways to deal with it. The focus will be mostly on different aspects of blame, and there will be a brief product demo of the excellent Xangati Management Dashboard at the end. If you liked their free version it’s a chance to see the full thing and be part of a good discussion. Lots of good reasons to attend so go sign up now!. All that aside, I feel that …

Read More

Reality vs. CxOs

by

I made a comment last week on Twitter in response to an HP presenter’s topic of IT Sprawl, at Tech Field Day: “Just because the CxO doesn’t understand what all those servers do doesn’t mean it is sprawl.” I’m not really going to elaborate much more on sprawl right now. What I do want to point out is a little synchronicity in Stephen O’Grady’s post, “Not Dead Yet: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Java,” partly because it’s a good read, partly because I love to hate Java, and partly because it has one of the best Venn diagrams I’ve seen yet this year: I’ve always liked what the RedMonk guys have to say, because they’re developer-focused, and I’ve …

Read More

Preventing Blame

by

I’ve been writing lately about Blame and my attempt at Understanding Blame. I guess I didn’t mean to turn this into a miniseries but there’s been a lot of interest. Including from Xangati – it turns out they’ve been talking about this same topic, in the context of their products, of course, but they’ve got some really cool stuff going on with their Management Dashboards and free tools. I’m glad others think so, too. Though I don’t know if Sean Clark’s calling them “Skynet” constitutes a compliment, though. 🙂 At least the end of civilization will be well monitored. Anyhow, they’ve asked me to help host a webinar on the topic, a conversation & forum on blame, why it happens, …

Read More

Understanding Blame

by

On Tuesday I posted about how virtualization teams are the one-stop shop for blame. There was some excellent commentary on it, from people who represent all areas of IT. Two things became clear: Everybody blames everybody. App admins blame virtualization admins. Virtualization blames storage and networking. Networking blames virtualization and storage. Storage blames virtualization. Blame isn’t unique to one area of IT, or even to IT among the human race. Nobody likes to think that they’ve messed up, and nobody likes to admit an error, so it’s easier to point the finger at others. Heck, often people don’t even know they’ve made an error, so it’s got to be someone else’s problem. A subset of comments I received, some privately, …

Read More

Blame

by

The idea of the “good old days” is usually false, especially in IT. With one exception, there hasn’t been a better time to be in IT or working with technology. The exception is virtualization and blame. Back in the day it used to be the storage guy’s fault, directly, when the storage was slow. Or the network guy’s problem. Or the app admin, with their inefficient apps. Maybe it was the guy who runs the LDAP servers. Maybe it was the OS vendor, or the hardware vendor shipped us a lemon. Now, though, it seems that it’s always the virtualization guy’s fault. For everything. Virtualization has turned IT into a nanny state. Because virtual environments sit between applications and nearly …

Read More

+ More Posts +