Category Archives: common knowledge - Page 3

Are my EMC products affected by the bleeding heart SSL bug?

Posted by on April 11, 2014 No comments
Bleeding heart

It’s been all over the news this week:

Bleeding heart

Heartbleed OpenSSL bug

OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f  as well as 1.0.2-beta1 are indicated to be vulnerable to Heartbeat Vulnerability.

Due to a missing bounds check in OpenSSL during the TLS heartbeat extension, a maximum of 64 KiB of memory can be revealed to a connected client or server. This may potentially allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain access to sensitive information such as private keys, login passwords, and encryption keys (the so-called Secret Keys). As a result of this disclosure of potentially sensitive information, these Secret Keys could be leveraged to decrypt other sensitive information or conduct so-called man-in-the-middle attacks.

References:

I won’t copy/paste the complete list in this post as the list will be updated over time, but in general I can disclose that (according to EMC) Brocade FOS, Centera, Clariion, Connectrix Manager, Control Center, Data Domain OS, ESRS, Isilon OneFS, , Networker, RecoverPoint, Replication Manager, ViPR, VNVe, VNX1, VNX2, VPLEX, XtremIO are not vulnerable.

You should read the article on bit.ly/1hwgFpW for specific other products as there are a few that might need attention.

Make sure you patch your products if you need to and please change your passwords every now and then (and in this case as soon as possible).

How to translate Windows disk ids to storage array’s LUNs

Posted by on March 12, 2014 7 comments

Converting disk information in a VM into the actual LUN information

We’ve all been there: you have a certain Windows virtual machine with several disks of the same size and you don’t know which Windows-disk is in fact which storage LUN.

The VMware settings for this VM might look like this:

VM-config

Read more »

EMC 2 or EMC II: which is which?

Posted by on January 9, 2014 No comments

David Goulden is the new CEO of EMC Information Infrastructure (EMC II)

Joe Tucci remains Chairman and CEO of EMC Corporation. But what is the difference between the two EMCs? EMC2 or EMC II, which is which?

EMC Information Infrastructure, AKA EMC II is one of the businesses in the EMC Federation.

In their press release on January 8, 2014 EMC says: “Over the past year David has done a phenomenal job of running EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.  David is both knowledgeable and widely respected across EMC and fully deserves this promotion,” said Joe Tucci.  “I am looking forward to continuing to work with David in my current capacity as Chairman and CEO of EMC Corporation.”

EMC2 (Joe Tucci) is the major brand name and lies “on top” of the whole EMC family and the companies EMC II (David Goulden), VMware (Pat Gelsinger) and Pivotal (Paul Maritz) as such. IIG and RSA are part of EMC II.

EMC Technical Support Links

Posted by on June 19, 2013 No comments

EMC Velocity Services: Technical Support Links

I just found this page on ECN (EMC Community Network) which helps me a lot finding the right information faster that just using Google.

So this time it’s only a short post, but I hope it helps you find information much quicker.

Here’s the link: https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-10850

the community is about helping each other: partition table lost and found

Posted by on June 11, 2013 No comments

Hardware:

  • 1 Windows 2008R2 server containing 2 HBAs
  • 2 SAN switches
  • EMC VNX-5100
  • 1 LUN presented over 4 paths (2 per HBA)
  • no PowerPath or MPIO, so Windows host sees 4 vdisks and uses only 1 (with the risk of corruption)

Scenario:

After an unexpected reboot the host lost access to the data on the LUN and it seemed as if the vdisk was unformatted or at least corrupted.

  • I checked the VNX, but all 4 paths were available
  • “diskpart” showed the disk, but no volumes, so Windows people thought it was a “SAN issue” (which it wasn’t, of course)
  • I tried enabling MPIO, but by default this host made the LUN (now visible as 1 vdisk instead of 4) read only
  • After disabling MPIO I installed PowerPath (unlicensed) to be sure Windows only sees 1 vdisk instead of 4
  • After the reboot I once again saw 1 vdisk and PowerPath showed 4 paths (of which 2 unlicensed)
  • Still no luck accessing the data

the Community starts here

And here is where it gets interesting. The strength of the community is where you help each other and in this case the customer called me to inform me that since he had nothing to loose anyway he used “TestDisk by CGSecurity” and this tool actually discovers data patterns on disks and in the blink of an eye NTFS was found and the partition could be restored.

No format and restore of an earlier backup was necessary!