Category Archives: maintenance - Page 3

Free Royal TS/X NFR license for EMC Elect, MVP, vExpert, Cisco Champions, CTP

Posted by on February 26, 2015 4 comments

Royal ts

Get your own NFR license for Royal TS/X

I usually don’t like to make too much of a fuzz about free giveaways, but we all need RDP, telnet and SSH clients and this one is worth the extra effort. Try it! So far I like it very much.

You can apply for an activation code on .

vExperts, MVPs, Cisco Champions, EMC Elect and CTPs can request a free Royal TS/X NFR license! You need to prove in some way that you are one of those community experts, so they can verify and you’ll get an email with your own key!

If you have questions, you can reach out to @royaltsapp on Twitter.

Cisco releases update for its SAN switches to fix the Shellshock aka Bashbug

Posted by on November 18, 2014 No comments
Cisco MDS

Although I was triggered by a daily update I received from EMC in this knowledge base article: https://support.emc.com/kb/194669, it was Cisco who finally published an update for various firmwares that did not have a fix yet for the shellshock aka bashbug.
You can find all Release Notes on the Cisco site at http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/storage-networking/mds-9000-nx-os-san-os-software/products-release-notes-list.html.
The EMC version of the Release Notes can be found here:

If you haven’t upgraded yet, I’d plan to do so in the very near future!

How to start copy to hotspare manually

Posted by on November 11, 2014 5 comments
Hard Drive

I recently had to manually invoke a hot spare in a VNX 5200, but in Unisphere the option was greyed out.

Unisphere_No-CopyToHotSpare

On the CLI the command wasn’t supported. Now what?

CopyToHotSpare_fail

According to https://support.emc.com/kb/184890 the proper command is now

naviseccli -h [ip of one SP] copytodisk [source-disk] [hot spare]

CopyToDisk_Success

Using the “getdisk” command will show you the actual rebuild has started.

Bare in mind that the way to address disks is in the format “Bus_Enclosure_Disk”, so for example 1_2_3 means disk 3 (the 4th disk) in enclosure 2 on bus 1.

In Unisphere you can actually see the progress of the rebuild:

Disk Rebuild in Unisphere

How to change the VNX weekly heartbeat date and time

Posted by on May 23, 2014 No comments

Changing the time for the weekly heartbeat

People with Clariion or VNX systems installed on site know that these arrays will email “home” (that’s EMC/you) once a week on a seemingly random date/time. Ok, once the day of the week and the time are set, each week the “I’m still alive” email will go out at that time. But what if you don’t want to have that email sent out at Thursday at 2:47AM and you want all of your arrays to send out that email on Saturday at noon sharp? You will need to adjust the parameters. I didn’t find a way to change the weekday, so I’m changing the time less than a day before it needs to run. So if I want it to run on Saturday at noon, I could run this script on Friday after noon. It will pick the next available day automatically.

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Configuring timezone and NTP on a Cisco MDS switch

Posted by on May 6, 2014 1 comment

Timezone and NTP configuration of a Cisco MDS switch

Using a GUI for configuring purposes isn’t always the best thing to do, although it most certainly provides a level of overview that cannot be obtained on the CLI.

I’ve found out the Device Manager default settings for NTP for example are that IPv4 addresses used to point to an NTP entity is set to “peer” and if you don’t use peer synchronization, but have a dedicated NTP server instead, it’s better to place a check mark on the “server” item. Also if you have several time sources, you can set a preferred one by placing a check mark at the particular entity.

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