Archive for the ‘NSP’ Category

QOS and IP Accounting with BGP under linux

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

At NSP we've go a fibre connection into the building, and a 10MBit feed from our ISP, and over that we're allowed 10MBit of national and 3 Mbit PIR of international traffic. Note that this adds up to more than 10Mbit in total! This can cause annoying problems, like ...

Exporting Tape Autoloaders via iSCSI

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

A while ago I posted about {{post id="iscsi-for-scsi-device-passthrough-under-xen-enterprise" text="exporting a tape drive via iSCSI"}} to enable windows VMs to backup to a SCSI tape drive under Citrix Xenserver. I spent a couple of hours googling for whether or not you could do the same thing with a tape ...

Looking up .local DNS names under OSX

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

My workplace uses a .local DNS suffix for all internal DNS, which of course causes problems when you're running a system which uses any form of mdns - such as OSX or Ubuntu (or probably any modern Linux distro, I know SuSE had this problem about 6 years ago). The ...

OSS Network Imaging / Install services

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

I'm very interested in the topic of network deployments of operating systems, specifically the various Microsoft OSs, as I can already install linux via PXEboot. There's two main groups of software in this field - unattended or scripted installs, and imaged installs. A while ago I found a tool called Unattended, ...

HP AiO iSCSI and Citrix Xenserver

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

A couple of our clients have HP AiO1200 iSCSI systems. These are nice enough units, especially for entry level iSCSI SANs. They're in a slightly modified HP DL320s chassis, and run Windows 2003 Storage Server, as well as some custom built HP management tools. I've never had an easy run when ...

Linux iSCSI stacks and multiple initiators per target LUN

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

I've used a few hardware based iSCSI stacks for Xenserver shared storage backends, but never had spare hardware to run up software based stacks. This is rather backwards from the usual way people would test things I guess, but it's how it worked out for us. However, we're now getting some ...

Week of Xenserver Bugs

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

Over the last week I've been required to fix four different bugs relating to Xenserver. Not all were major bugs, not all were even Xenserver's fault. DVD drive missing The first bug, and actually one that first showed itself several months ago, is that the option to attach the server's DVD drive ...

Thoughts on OSX

Monday, March 24th, 2008

I recently got a new laptop for work - the base model Macbook Pro. Slightly unfortunately, I got it about three weeks before the refresh, but I don't really care about the fairly minor changes. The slight CPU speed bump isn't really worth worrying about, although the new penryn based ...

Xenserver Enterprise + Fibrechannel storage = live migration

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

I finally got round to booking time at the IBM demo center to have a fiddle with Xen Enterprise on shared storage. They've got a good range of entry-level kit at the demo center, but the important bits (for me anyway) were a Bladecenter H chassis with some HS21 blades ...

Benchmarks of an Intel SRSC16 RAID controller

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

One of our clients gave us an Intel server with an Intel SRSC16 SATA RAID controller and a 500 GB +hotspare RAID1 set up on it, to install XenServer Express 4.0.1 system. While building the system up for him, I noticed abysmal write perfomance. It was taking around ...