Less than three weeks after getting all the Equallogic arrays up to the latest firmware while making the most of a power failure down time along comes another firmware update! The Equallogic arrays have two controllers each with redundant network connections for SAN traffic. One controller is the active controller and the other is the […]
Author Archives: randrews
Every cloud… or, Making the most of a power failure!
April 13, 2011 – 9:09 am
Sunday morning – power goes out. Fried squirrel for lunch and a couple hours of cool down time for the servers. On the up side I managed to: Reconfigure the physical SAN links Update the 1 GbE SAN switch stack firmware Update the Equallogic array firmware All these things would have required down time or […]
Virtualization…
February 17, 2011 – 4:20 pm
So here’s what virtualization looks like… I keep walking by the stacks of 40+ old servers that have been virtualized and decided today was the day to take a picture for posterity, or at least for as long as this blog exists.
Smith Spam – Email delivery from Publishing Concepts (PCI)
February 11, 2011 – 12:42 pm
Had a report this morning of very slow delivery of a test email from PCI. PCI is an external mass-mailing service which is used by several departments for sending messages to all students. It is also the mechanism for sending the twice weekly eDigest. A quick analysis of email handling my the McAfee appliances over […]
ADM3PO Restart required
February 11, 2011 – 9:32 am
Had a couple of Big brother alerts overnight for lost connectivity to GWADM3PO (Physical server) and also several reports of client issues on arriving at work. Couldn’t get a remote console so went to the physical console which showed multiple losses of time synchronization. Restarted the server in order to give it a clean start.
Failing forwards to Gmail
February 8, 2011 – 9:56 am
While investigating the bounce message issue I noticed the McAfee appliances reporting a lot of failed deliveries to Gmail accounts. I would hazzard a guess that these are all accounts where a GroupWise rule is forwarding all email. The rejection message is in the format: Bounced: 74.125.91.27, 550 5.7.1 Unauthenticated email is not accepted from […]
Bouncy! Bouncy! Email delivery problems
February 8, 2011 – 9:45 am
Had a weird situation develop yesterday (of course I had the day off) where some, but not all, inbound email was being bounced with an error 442 No delivery mechanism available message. A quick check showed a lot of queued messages at the McAfee appliances from no_reply@smith.edu and the MessageScreen appliances being swamped by these […]
Prospero Server successful migration
February 3, 2011 – 9:45 am
On Monday January 31st the Prospero server was successfully migrated from a Windows 2003 server to a new Windows 2008 R2 server. In the process the Panopto software was upgraded to the latest version. This server is used by ET to store and stream video recordings of classes. The physical server was migrated to a […]
Hanging SUSE GW Servers
February 3, 2011 – 9:37 am
A couple of days ago one of the POPIMAP servers and one of the WebAccess servers were in a hung state and would not allow a console login. At that time both machines had 100% CPU utilization so I set up a VM alert to let me know if they remained at > 60% utilization […]
McAfee Email Appliances updated to EWS 5.6
February 1, 2011 – 11:27 am
The new appliances had been experiencing a few process abort errors. While looking for patches I discovered a point release software update was available. This morning both appliances were upgraded from EWS 5.5 to EWS 5.6 The upgrade went smoothly with no configuration loss and the cluster successfully handled the loss of each appliance in […]
