Archive for May, 2009

iScsi SAN or NAS with VMWare

May 27th, 2009

A while back I posted something about iScsi SANS.  What I’d really like to see, once all is said and done, is to be able to virtualize almost every server we have.  I’ve been eyeing up the Lefthand redundant storage solution but the price is always an issue.  Up until recently, the likelyhood of moving forward with virtualizing our servers and storage has been out of the question due to funding.  Now, I’ve seen a small crack of light from the door accidently being opened up a crack so I’m just going to pretend it’s going to open and I’ll be showered with budget numbers and blank purchase orders.

I just noticed a post by a netapp employee, Dave.  I haven’t thought of running VMWare over NFS to a NAS.  To me, without looking at pricing*.  Any thoughts on this?

*Sales people, when someone from a K-12 Public School District calls for pricing, it’s not because they’re ready to buy.  We’re calling because if we can’t afford it, we’re not buying it.  I don’t even bother getting too deep into a possible project without knowing the pricing because that’s the bottom line regardless of features.  To the bosses, it’s as simple as why and how much?  When I see “call for pricing”, I cringe.  When someone tells me I have to sign an NDA to get pricing, goodbye.

Sysadmin Forums?

May 13th, 2009

I’ve always been a fan of web based message boards since UBB came out many moons ago.  Doing a quick google showed a few forums out there, some part of bigger boards like ars, and some that have seemed to be pretty dead.

If there isn’t anything dedicated to sys admins our there that is active, I wonder if there would be any desire to see one here?

Apparently, the best way to fix a problem…

May 13th, 2009

…is to walk away from it for about a month. In this case anyway.

We had a lot of legacy cruft in our network that has been and continues to be slowly phased out.  We have recently replaced our content filter running Bordermanager with a Barracuda 610 web filter appliance…sort of.  There is a legacy web based app which we have to run through the summer.  When I cut everyone over to the Barracuda away from Bordermanager, it broke the web application.  Right now, students go directly through the Barracuda, everyone else goes through the old proxy box which in turn goes through the Barracuda.  That wasn’t really a large issue, but the proxy server has been locking up cold lately.  The only thing that really changes on that box is the web cache processed by the proxy nlm.  Maybe it was choking on something there…or I’m just grasping at straws.  Either way, I don’t think it matters much, since ultimately that box needs to go away.

I finally got to spend a couple of minutes on the problem today.  NSLookups on the hostname worked fine.  But I couldn’t ping it from my test machine.  I could ping it from my own machine without any issues.  I figured out what was going on.  The web app server is on the old legacy 10.0.0.0/8 network where my workstation and the proxy server all reside.  So, routing is no issue there.  The default gateway of the proxy and my machine is our core 4507.  Unfortunatly, due to more legacy issues, the default gateway of the web app server is an old pfsense firewall connected hooked to our old ISP connection so it can’t have a proper gateway to the inside of the network.  That goofy setup is only around because of DNS issues and the fact that Oracle application servers, at least our version, are incredibly stupid and need a complete reload if you want to change the hostname.  There’s more to that story, but suffice it to say, we have to keep this setup until the summer.

To fix the whole mess, or rather duct tape it together, I just configured static routes into pfsense for the rest of the network.  So, maybe walking away for an hour would have worked, I just chose a month.  Also, this is a testament to keeping things simple.