VMware Software and Firmware Upgrade Strategy (HPE Focussed)

Keeping a VMware ecosystem up to date is a challenge. Ensuring you are running a supportable and stable combination of VMware ESXi, device drivers, extensions and hardware firmware is a lot of moving parts to keep “in synch”. Essentially the version of the device drivers needs to be supported by VMware ESXi, the version of […]

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VMware vLCM with HPE iLO Amplifier Error Adding Service Pack for Proliant (SPP)

A fairly common error with a fairly easy fix. When adding the Service Pack for Proliant (SPP) I was seeing this error message: “some error occured while online deport registration” The error appears here, the “important notes” gives you the clue to the fix. You need to ensure that your iLO Amplifier appliance(s) are not […]

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SNMPWalk 101

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a protocol that can be used for monitoring and managing network connected devices. Personally I use it primarily for monitoring, it is a useful way to interrogate network connected devices for information about their status. For example querying to identify if a power supply has failed on a switch, […]

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NagiosXI – REST API to Manipulate Objects

NagiosXI has a REST API that can be used to add, edit and remove objects from the configuration. Full details of the configuration and use of this can be found on your installation at: http://nagiosserver.domain.com/nagiosxi/help/?xiwindow=api.php (or you can find it through the Advanced Configuration menu). Each user has an APIKey which can also be found via […]

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Quick Guide – SSH Public Key Authentication (Ubuntu Linux)

A quick guide to setting up SSH Public Key Authentication. SSH Public Key Authentication means you can authenticate to a remove server via SSH without needing to enter your username and password. Instead you create a public-private key pair, then place the public key on the target server. Then when you SSH to the server […]

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Microsoft Exchange 2016 DAG Error Setting Witness Server and WitnessDirectory

We have a number of 2 node DAGs which provide our Microsoft Exchange 2016 service. Being a 2 node DAG a file share witness server is in place. We had a datacentre event that took out one of the nodes and the witness server, rendering the one of the DAGs unhealthy and a second in […]

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Dell PowerScale – Find Connected Clients

Finding the connected clients to a Dell PowerScale storage cluster is fairly straightforward, however you should be aware that it only shows clients that have active IO (input-output) operations in flight at the time you run the command. You can still have clients connected, but are idling, so are invisible. You can also specify a […]

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