lsi

LSI Security Question Fail

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I was trying to register for access to the LSI download center and in the process I ran across a very interesting security question: Gee, guys, if I knew what my password was I wouldn’t need the security question. I also enjoy “What is your mother’s last name?” Consider that a disproportionate number of IT staff are men, and that, at least in the USA, women of my mother’s era usually took their husband’s last name. It’s highly probable that my mother’s last name is the same as mine… This is all on top of the fact that it’s asking for passwords and such without SSL. I think it’s safe to say that your security is not their priority.

How to Change SCSI Controllers on your Linux VM

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A question from Matt Vogt prompted this, where he wants to go from the BusLogic  SCSI controller to the LSI Logic SAS controller. It’s actually a straightforward conversion if you have the right steps. This is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, and 5, but the principle should be the same for everything. It’s basically: snapshot, change config files, change hardware. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, in contrast, appears to have all the LSI Logic, parallel & SAS, drivers, as well as the paravirtual SCSI drivers, so all you need to do is shut the VM down and change the type of SCSI controller you’re using. I always recommend trying this on a test VM before you try …

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Dell, SSD, CacheCade, and H700/H800 Controllers

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Dell’s announcement last week that their rebranded LSI RAID controllers, the H700 & H800, now have the ability to use certain local SSD disks as a read cache tier. This is the “CacheCade” technology LSI has offered since September 2010, and looks functionally similar to technologies like NetApp’s FlashCache, where SSD maintains a copy of “hot” blocks on the fast storage. There are some limitations to it, namely that it will require the H700/H800 models with 1 GB of NVRAM on them, and comes as part of a certain firmware level. The feature will also only work with certain SSDs from Dell, so you can’t plan to just cram a cheap Intel X-25 in there (which is unfortunate, in my …

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