Category Archives: maintenance - Page 4

XP-patches on the black market?

Posted by on April 29, 2014 5 comments

Windows XP patches on the black market?

Despite what several reports say, Windows XP is still an operating system that is widely used, all over the world. And now that Microsoft has stopped its official (and free) support of this succesful OS, a lot of people find themselves in need of a scarce good: XP patches. So what happens when you need a scarce good: a black market!

An official date for the first black market is already known: May 13, 2014, since that would be the first day the formerly regular patch distribution will be no longer be initiated for Windows XP.

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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).

Fixing misalignment without moving data

Posted by on March 19, 2014 No comments

Fixing misaligned partitions

It’s quite an old topic, but I recently found a great tool which allows you to re-align partitions without the need to manually move data from the misaligned disk to a new aligned disk.

First of all I must add that all the credits go to Nicholas Weaver, since he wrote the original blog and the actual tool!

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Which Cisco NX-OS should I use?

Posted by on February 12, 2014 No comments

This time a really short reminder-like post. Somehow I often end up trying to locate certain release notes of various equipment, but Cisco organized theirs for the SAN switches in an orderly manner: Release Notes

Every NX-OS version is listed here and in each all supported equipment is named. I found this to be very helpful.

How to set the “The array is alive” on a specific day and time on a VNX

Posted by on September 10, 2013 No comments

The need for weekly messages

EMC’s Symmetrix already knew this feature for a decade or so (or even longer), but since a few years EMC’s pushing customers to make every array to email home once a week so they can keep track of its pulse. And they’re not joking about its importance either, since once an array skips a beat, a severity 1 ticket is being created to get that fixed as soon as possible. EMC truly seems to care about the arrays they have running all over the world, so they’re indeed in good shape and being monitored actively.

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