Zsoldier's Tech Blog

Summary: This alarm means that server's CIMC system event log has filled up.  Below you will find the steps to clear this type alarm. PreReq: This assumes you are utilizing B-series UCS servers.  C-series may be slightly different in practice. Resolution: If you're vCenter is configured w/ default alarms, you'll likely see something like pictured below in vCenter under the hardware status tab: To clear this alert, you'll need to empty the SEL Logs in UCS of the blade related to your service profile.  You are not likely to find SEL Logs as part of the service profile. Once you've opened the related blade, select the SEL Logs tab.  Review and/or export the logs so you simply do not clear something that may need to be investigated.  Once done, you can safely clear the logs: Once the SEL Logs have cleared, the alert in vCenter should reset to green in a few minutes.

Rather than regurgitate all the information whole here is the skinny: SSH into your UCS chassis (aka primary fabric interconnect) connect nxos ethanalyzer local interface mgmt limit-captured-frames 2000 write volatile:/mycapture.cap ethanalyzer is the command local is default interface so we can tell it where we want to capture packets from. mgmt is the one I'm interested in limit-capture-frames is there because it limits to 10 by default and is way too fast when troubleshooting. write to output a capture file located in volatile memory (deletes when FI is rebooted.) Exit connect local-mgmt cp volatile:/mycapture.cap scp://username@linuxservername/somepath Where 'scp' is defined, can be ftp, sftp, tftp, volatile, or workspace as well. The capture file can be read in applications like wireshark . This helped me figure out my LDAP Authentication issues . Full article and explanation of how to do what I've outlined above was found here: http://...

Update: UCS 2.1  addresses this particular issue.  Bug ID:   CSCth96721 Summary: Found an interesting UCS bug on 2.0(3b) .  May be resolved in 2.0(4d) , but have not tested yet.  This particular problem only manifests itself if your Active Directory tree structure is elaborate and causes a user account's distinguishedName to be longer than 128 characters. Detailed: Essentially UCS queries Active Directory w/ samAccountFilter, it receives the results of the query.  It then makes a bind call against the DN using the results it received.  The problem is the DN bind call variable on the UCS side seems to be limited to 128 characters which it then truncates the information when it makes the bind call. Workaround: The only real workaround is to move the affected account to another a higher level OU to shorten it's distinguished name. Powershell: You can use powershell to determine the length of your distinguished name by utilizing the Quest Acti...

I've been using Jing to record short tutorial videos and uploading them to my IIS server's directory.  To view or share them I would have to create a simple HTML file.  I decided to automate this process by simply having the formatted HTML file generated when I threw a swf file into the directory using powershell. # Here is the local directory on the IIS server where I'm throwing my swf files. # This script is meant to run as a schedule task every 5 minutes or more if you like. $VidPath = "D:\inetpub\wwwroot\videos" # Here I'm querying for all the swf files in the directory. $SWFFiles = get-childitem $VidPath | ? {$_.Extension -match ".swf"} # This is where I begin to look @ each swf file and check whether they have an associated html file. foreach ($SWFFile in $SWFFiles) { $HTMLCheck = $null $HTMLCheck = Get-ChildItem $VidPath | where {$_.basename -eq $SWFFile.basename -and $_.Extension -ne $SWFFile.Extension} # If I did not find an ...

Summary: Needed to update local computer description on servers that I own.  Easy peasy w/ powershell, or so I thought. PreRequisites: Powershell 2.0+ Quest.ActiveRoles.AdManagement Snapin SysInternal PSExec Details: Windows Server 2008 and 'Vista' based kernel systems seem to have some kind of WMI bug.  Searching the web has turned up only a mention of something regarding the use of "ItemIndex".  I'm @ a loss.  This script will work for 2008 R2 systems and the only work around appears to make use of sysinternals psexec cmd to call out the net config command on the local system. Add-PSSnapin quest.activeroles.admanagement $servers = Get-QADComputer -Name "someprefix*" $Description = "Something I want to insert"  foreach ($computer in $servers) { # Simply a check to see whether the system is active or not. $Ping = Get-WmiObject Win32_PingStatus -Filter "Address = '$($computer.name)'" | Select S...

Summary: Needed to script configure all my 100+ ESXi hosts w/ a scratch location.  Having a permanent scratch location configured is helpful when an error such as a purple screen of death (PSOD) occurs on ESXi.  It is not a requirement, but definitely a best practice. PreRequisites: Powershell 2.0 + PowerCLI 5.1 + vCenter 4.1 + Local or Shared Datastore Local is easy if you standardize on naming of a local datastore.   I'll focus on this in my script example. Shared Datastore essentially accomplishes a similar goal of a remote syslog server, you'll want to be sure to separate logs to their own individual directory. Scaling may become an issue unless you focus these shared datastores among clusters rather than all hosts. Details: