Technology – Page 5

Setting up OverPlay in Viscosity

This article will cover how you go about plugging the OverPlay VPN service into Viscosity, for which there are no instructions on how to do anywhere on the net. If you have questions about what OverPlay or Viscosity is, then this article is not for you. Pre-requisites Viscosity installed Download the OverPlay connections list from here. Download the OverPlay CA cert from here. Have your username and password handy Choose the server you want to connect to from the server list. Making it happen Uncompress the connections file Bring up Preferences in Viscosity. Click on the + icon in the […]

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Unable to update iLO3 firmware on HP BL465c G7 blades

We’ve recently needed to upgrade the OA firmware on our HP C7000 blade enclosures to support Gen8 blades. A pre-requisite is to first make sure the ROM/BIOS and iLO firmware is up to a certain level. While attempting to upgrade iLO on the HP BL465c G7 blades, quite often i’d get an error upgrading from 1.16 and below up to 1.50. I’ve contacted HP about it and they refer to a support document detailing steps on how to perform steps to recover from a failed iLO update. These steps are quite involved and require downing a server, setting DIP switches

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Unable to SSH into ESXi server

You’ve turned on SSH, and even enabled the firewall profile for SSH. But for some reason you still can’t SSH into the ESXi server and get a “Connection Refused” message back when hitting port 22. You’ve also checked your corporate firewall and that’s it’s not blocking comms. Have a look in Tasks and Events to see if the server’s ramdisk for root is full. There’s a good chance that it is. This is a problem i’ve encountered with vSphere 5.1 recently and is preventing SSH from starting properly. The cause of the ramdisk filling up is ESXi not truncating /var/log/wtmp

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Vantec NST-D100SU and 3TB drives

If you purchased your Vantec NST-D100SU drive dock some time ago, there’s a good chance it won’t support 3TB drives. You’ll only see around 800MB of space when you plug your 3TB drive in, where 2TB drives work just fine. To fix the problem you’ll need a firmware update to support the larger capacity drives. For some reason this information isn’t available on the Vantec website. I had to contact technical support directly. They took about half a month to reply so to save you the hassle here are the links. The firmware update can be obtained direct from Vantec

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PowerCLI script for changing pathing policy en masse

Say you deploy a new SAN, and you’re in the process of migrating all your VM’s from the old datastores to the new. When you go to add the new datastores, ESX sets the incorrect pathing policy so now you have to go change it on each and every datastore, on each and every ESX server. I’ve had to go through this and it’s a pain in the bum. Here’s a small PowerCLI script I wrote that will save you the hassle of doing it by hand. Connect-VIServer SERVER $esxservers = Get-Datacenter “DATACENTRE” | Get-VMHost foreach ($server in $esxservers) {

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