#NetGear, #ReadyNAS, virtualisation and it's support penalties (a draft from a few months ago)

I'm writing as a technician in the US is fixing a NetGear ReadyNAS. At 2:28 in the morning.

We don't yet know what went wrong, but we do know it stopped talking to the LAN for management and the Private SAN about 21 1/2 hours ago.

I got it working again by lunchtime, but then about 90 minutes later it dropped out. Permanently it seemed, so it was time to call out the big guns.

A tech support call later had someone on the phone from Holland to help sort things out, but that introduced some fun.

As the NAS supported the infrastructure at this site, including the gateway server, and email - there was to be no email, and no remote control sessions in the normal course of events,

And, as the ADSL links are in the other building a physical link into the back of the router was not possible.

This is what I needed to have working:
-1. A tablet working and connected to the Internet without using the main LAN
0. An email account (outlook.com at the moment) through which I can send and receive emails outside the infrastructure to the support team.
1. A laptop connected to the DMZ directly (which is physical, not virtual) and able to connect to the Internet.
2. A wireless connection to the internal LAN that could attempt to talk to the management interface of the ReadyNAS.
3. A serial cable to plug into the ReadyNAS for telnet connection and direct management.
4. A USB to serial UART converter
5. The drivers for the converter!!!
6. Network cables that would reach from the laptop to the ReadyNAS, from the laptop to the DM'S Hub, and from the ReadyNAS to the DMZ hub.
7. Patience (there was a nearly 4 hour break in communications with support when they did not answer my updates or emails #fail
8. Access to http://www.readynas.com/kb/faq/boot/how_do_i_use_the_boot_menu for instructions on how to reboot the ReadyNAS into different modes (watch out for factory reset!!!)

So, would you be able to get this running in under an hour?
Do you even have a serial cable in the office now?
If you do, do you have a computer (that you can then connect to the Internet) with a serial port on it?

Thankfully I did, but I might easily not have.

Army Bear at Ely a week ago

With my partner in crime Keith Shering (http://keithh4h.wordpress.com/) we did a further collection at Ely station a week ago. Again I went in disguise and this time we raised over £350 for Help For Heroes and our bike ride in May/June.

One more is planned, in April. Looking forward to it!

Collecting for Help For Heroes

This month my comrade in arms Keith Shering (His H4H blog here) collected at a couple of local railway stations.

As I rarely post pictures of myself here, I thought a couple of me would make a change!

Look out for future pictures from the Marines and the Army!

The joys of Exchange 2010 Service Pack 3 installation

Having just completed this process on a few of several servers.  Some news from the frontline…

1. If you have Backup Exec in the mix, then stop the service before you start installing SP3 on any of your boxes.
2. You may want (or need) to do the schema update to Active Directory before you start.  Either way, it’d be a good idea to ensure the upgrade is done and replicated before proceeding too far down the install
3. You may get a warning about obtaining a Hotfix from  support.microsoft.com/kb/2550886 during preparation on servers with a MBX role – grab it now, and have a look.  But it only applies to improved Failover Cluster performance in stretched DAG’s across datacentres.  So you may well not need it.

4. You may wish to stop your exchange services before running setup.exe, I have seen it fail to wait long enough to stop services properly during the upgrade.  The SP3 install actually disables them before stopping (if you run services.msc you can see it happening).
5. Lastly, when the setup is close to finishing and attacking the server roles, make sure Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology service is running, if not then the AD communication will fail and you will have a big red cross on your screen, that may have an impact on your cardiac health!  This can be monitored for and the services started by hand when the installation moves onto “Restoring services”.  So far I have seen this issue on MBX servers.  I decided to do it for all servers irrespective as the upgrade rolled out

Web pages that may help you:

• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj965774(v=exchg.141).aspx – release notes
• http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2772.exchange-schema-versions-common-questions-answers.aspx - schema version numbers

• http://eightwone.com/references/schema-versions/ - checking schema versions
• http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/09/25/announcing-exchange-2010-service-pack-3.aspx - announcement

So, onto further servers!

PS1: Oh, yes, you really mustn’t ignore a good backup as a really good idea – especially for those cardiac moments!

PS2: version changes in the management console (at the site on which I’m working) moved from 14.2 (Build 247.5) to 14.3 (Build 123.4)