October 2005

[31-Oct-2005]
EVA 8000 fired up:   While I was in Orlando a couple of weeks ago, our new EVA 8000 arrived. Some of the guys got it on the floor, and I had previously arranged power and connectivity for it. This morning, we installed Comand View EVA on the management appliance, plugged it in, and fired it up. (268 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[25-Oct-2005]
VMS is 28:   Today is the 28th anniversary of the release of VMS. Yes, VMS 1.0 was released on 25th October, 1977. (19 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[24-Oct-2005]
Performance class:   I'm attending a class given by Wayne Sauer of Parsec this week. This should be a great refresher for me as I only get to do deep performance tuning when there's a problem, while Wayne does this all the time - either teaching or consulting - and therefore knows it like the back of his hand. (56 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[15-Oct-2005]
HP Technical Forums:   I'm off to the conference formally known as the DECUS Symposium tomorrow. The conference was originally scheduled for New Orleans, and was unfortunately postponed when Hurricane Katrina flooded that city. It's now been scheduled for Orlando. (208 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[13-Oct-2005]
Renaming HSG80 connections:   Here is a command procedure to automatically rename connections on HSG80 pairs, delete offline connections, and set the operating system type correctly. (1436 words, 1 comments, 0 pings)

[12-Oct-2005]
ACS 8.8-2:   Last week we received a letter from HP concerning a significant bug in ACS 8.8-2. The bug could cause data corruption on the addition or removal of a member from a mirrorset (i.e., RAID1 or RAID 0+1). The letter was a tad vague about what addition or removal meant. I asked Engineering and was told it was both manually issuing the command to the controller, or the controller failing a disk out and pulling in a spare. Yikes. As we have terabytes of critical production data on mirrorsets, we were keen to get the latest patch on, and as of tonight, we are now running ACS 8.8-4. (107 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[06-Oct-2005]
Update on fandle busy problem:   As noted previously, the fandle busy problem that I described in the past reoccured even after the system was patched. I have just had confirmation from HP Engineering that a further timing window has been discovered that could also produce the error. So, the original patch wasn't dropped. It just didn't cover all eventualities. (54 words, 2 comments, 0 pings)