[[Mathias Chauvin]] - IT stuff

This post is part of the Sun Unix Infrastructure project.
The following documentation will handle the connection of a Sun Blade server (Sun Blade T6320) to a EMC Clariion CX3-20c using QLogic dual Fiber adapters and two McData DS4700M 4GB FC switches.

Clicking on the picture below will show you a quick overview of how the blades are connected to the SAN:

This documentation will then presents the steps to get a LUN presented to the servers.

• The first part will deal with the configuration of the FC switches.
• Then the creation of a LUN will be presented.
• Once the LUN has been created, the MPxIO will be configured in Solaris.
• Then the servers will be registered on the SAN using the Navisphere utility.
• At last, a close-up will be made on the disks that are presented to the blade servers.

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When using multiple interface on a RedHat server, with declared aliases, one might face the following issue when trying to rsh from one server to another using one of its alias name:

[user@rh-srv1 ~]# /usr/bin/rsh rh-svr2-b
rlogind: Host address mismatch.

To make it clear, the hosts file is similar to the following:

192.168.0.11     rh-srv1 rh-srv1-corp
192.168.1.11     rh-srv1 rh-srv1-a
192.168.2.11     rh-srv1 rh-srv1-b
192.168.3.11     rh-srv1 rh-srv1-c

192.168.0.12     rh-svr2 rh-svr2-corp
192.168.1.12     rh-svr2 rh-svr2-a
192.168.2.12     rh-svr2 rh-svr2-b
192.168.3.12     rh-svr2 rh-svr2-c

The Host address mismatch error comes from the fact that rlogin is trying to resolve 192.168.2.12 (the IP address of the rh-svr2-b host). But as rh-svr2-b is an alias of rh-svr2, rlogin will get 192.168.0.12 as the IP address of rh-svr2.

The solution to this issue is to allow the resolv+ library to return all IP address that are defined for the aliases:

From host.conf manpage:

multi Valid values are on and off. If set to on, the resolv+ library will return all valid addresses for a host that appears in the /etc/hosts file, instead of only the first. This is off by default, as it may cause a substantial performance loss at sites with large hosts files.

The solution is then to put

multi on 

in /etc/host.conf file.

What’s going on?!?!? It looks like I’m doing a lot of MS stuff these last few days
Well… yes I do!

Here is something I’ve been fighting for a couple of hours, so if it can save someone’s time…

In order to have a backup for remote users’ laptops (Yes, a folder redirection is not really the best way to do it when some of your users are 99.9% working from remote office), I’ve chosen to provide them with a “manual sync” using SyncToy, that users can run on their own!

The first thing to do is then to have SyncToy installed on every laptops that are to be “manually” synced. As users do not have Administrators privileges, the best way to install the tool is to set a GPO that applies to the computer (given that the tool is available in msi package).

Doing all the necessary, one might encounter this issue: The software does not get installed on the computer that are in the OU where the GPO is defined…
Having a look at the Application log in the Event Viewer, one may see this error:

Event Type:     Error
Event Source:   Application Management 
Event Category: None
Event ID:       102
Description:
The install of application "Package Name" from policy "Policy Name"
failed.
The error was : The installation source for this product is not 
available.

The solution? Well, the msi packages need to be installed in a DFS share to be available when the computer boots.
If none seems available on the domain, one may use the SysVol share…

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I was used to run Windows XP in a VMware virtual machine (using VMware player), when I decided to run it in a VirtualBox one!

Thanks to Katsumi Inoue, I found out that the Enable IO APIC option should be checked.

While the virtual disk of my VMware machine is split into 2GB chunks, VirtualBox is able to handle it successfully. Windows XP is just booting! VirtualBox is so great!

Nevertheless, I’ve been facing a small networking issue… Windows not being able to start the network device.
This is due to the fact that the driver loaded for the PCnet-FAST III device is VMware Accelerated AMD PCnet Adapter.

To get the device working simply replace the device driver with the AMD one:

The issue is fixed Enjoy accessing the network from the converted VMware to Virtualbox virtual WinXP machine!

By the way… do not forget about installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions
The only thing I miss is the USB support as I’m using the OSE version…

[UPDATED] Ooops, i’ve modified the link to the script as it was not working…

What I’ve been facing lately is to create folders on a Microsoft file server for every users listed in a specific OU in Active Directory.

To create these “home directories” with as less pain as possible, I’ve chosen to do it using a script

The script can be found here

More details there

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