one man, a bunch of servers, a sense of humor

An ignored blog gathers no info....

2010-03-30T09:36:00.001-07:00

been a year since I've posted anything due to changes in my personal life....time for a reboot

go here

http://itpondering.blogspot.com/

eDir and money

2009-04-17T06:29:00.001-07:00

Continuing the idea of a project to make the upgrade from 8.7.3.9 to at least 8.8.3. That will mean that we can start deploying OES2 and migrating away from classic netware. The cluster is growing, 90% of the file shares have been migrated with a reduction of 8 older servers. It's been a years since I took over Novell operations and it's been fun, I need to keep my windows skills up since that appears to be the way things are going under the current administration. Eventually they will see that paying 1/10th the cost are dealing with some small hassles is better than a 1000% increase in fees., if not, well, it is job security.

New Year, New Ideas

2009-01-27T20:13:00.001-08:00

Still fighting the war in the trenches moving the cluster along, got 4 more blades in the blade center and 8TB more in the SAN, which means that by end of 2Q2009 I should have most of the file servers migrated and be working on moving the printers. It's amazing that these moves are transparent to the users. Previously there was a rather strained procedure to move file shares and it rarely worked. Now using the Consolidation Utility has removed that pain and now after a reboot the users have their files.

Novell still has some legs, but we're also working on MS Sharepoint now, this should be interesting, and a relief to be finally getting back to doing more than working on Novell.

The Road to 8.8.x

2008-11-28T18:05:00.000-08:00

Planning to upgrade to 8.8.x eDir. The first MAJOR problem is that we have two legacy applications that have to run on NW5.1. Both servers are patched to 5.1 SP6 which is not on the list for 8.8.x. The person who supports both apps is notoriously unreliable. We need to get some ideas on how to do this. They want OES2-SLES wih 8.8.x and not NW65SP7 with 8.7.3.9. IF the apps can run on 5.1SP8 then we can go forward, but I'm willing to bet that the vendor is going to comeback with some "we only support 8.6.x edir... these servers were left behind for a reason, and with no one left around from the Novell team that built these these boxes it's like playing detective.

call me Sherlock

On Moving to New Digs

2008-11-19T15:44:00.000-08:00

When i took this job I moved from a windowless basement office furnished with furniture trash picked from the same building to a fairly modern office building where all employees were housed in identical 10X10 offices with the exception of Desktop and the Call Desk. That was luxury I rarely encountered in my career. The building was built as a model technology center by the organization and the plan was accomplished by IBM about 20 years ago.

Time to upset the cart.

On a random friday, 2 months ago, we were told to prepare to move into the data center (yeah, noise, cold, etc) for an extended stay. Last week we moved into our new digs where our offices used to be, a cube farm. For many of the long timers this is the first time they haven't had an office and it shows. Loud phone conversations, rude comments, offensive music are just some of the problems. Random wanderings seem to be one of the most offensive things, people need to respect other people's right to privacy and space. This will all shake out eventually.

LDAP to the Rescue.....

2008-09-28T06:14:00.000-07:00

We've been running LDAP for Groupwise authentication, our ERP solution , and our VPN for sometime now. Our LDAP is generated out of eDir and contains all the user info you could ask for.We have a vendor who supports our helpdesk and ticketing app. This app is part of a LARGER vendors IT solutions database. Management decided they wanted it to authenticate via said LDAP.

Hilarity ensues........

For two months the vendors asks for various server certs, different configs, and tries to blame eDir for their lack of authentication. The major vendor claims "we have no experience with doing this on eDir." Management finally has enough and gets our team involved. We install the eDir CA cert into their server and viola everything works. They were working with an assumption of AD all the time as well, trying to search o=domain,o=com instead of T=TREE.

I know eDir is not exactly the #1 directory service, buy you would think that there would be more of a commonality with LDAP....

apparently not....

I've petitioned for IDM training, so I can start building more connectors than the one that Novell built in June (edir to AD via the IDVAULT) . All I need now is the time to accomplish said training.

And the beat goes on......

2008-09-18T15:27:00.000-07:00

Cluster Phase 1, Part 3 went off fairly pain free. Gearing up for moving the final box onto the NWCS stack. Still have about 600gb of SAN space left after that, but I don't want to migrate anything else in until I have more hardware than 2 blades.

On the windows side of things (yeah I finally caught a project in the unused part of my skill set) we finished revamping some recycled hardware into a new backup solution. A HBA attached MSA1000 that had a troubled past is the heart of the system, we upgraded the firmware to current and active/active settings. We'll see how it performs tonight. It's going to be a monster running Backup Exec 12.d with 13.2TB of diskspace running on the the aforementioned MSA 1000. We' ve been geting about 2GB/s of throughput out of it, now we should be getting close to 4GB/s. We need to figure out how to attach a MS6030 library via Fiber next. After that we'll be adding a MSL2024 and another MS6030 (all SCSI) to the mix of tape drives. It'll be 4 LTO2 ad one LTO3 drive. We've dubbed this 8u Server, 13U's of disk and 14U of tape drives "Frankenstein".......

A major portion of my time is spent fixing the damage a group of consultants and employees did the to the Novell environment. It wasn't intentional I'm sure, but the end result was a hodgepodge of assort methodologies that isn't working. We've been having problems with iPrint/NDPS lately. That needs to be dug into more, and I need more data from the techs than "it doesn't print". Zen needs an overhaul, the app server is overbooked and underpowered. Not a good combination with 4000 users a day mapping drives and running Zen Imaging , WS import and removeal AND being a slpda server is a bit much.

No rest for the weary

2008-08-29T16:35:00.000-07:00

Been a good few weeks, but the pressure is still on, taking a break from the cluster migration to let it stabilize and so we can get a handle on exactly how many users we can allow to connect to each blade. I've capped the number of users arbitrarily at 4000 connections per blade for specification purposes. The next migration will put us at that limit.

They may have found an admin for the other position, but he doesn't have much in the Netware mojo dept. Apparently finding Novell geeks isn't easy, I'd settle for a linux geek since we are on course for going to OES2-SLES within the next year....but not my call.

They are getting ready to light off a major project to replace the main info system, should be an interesting scramble as resources move away.

Been Busy....

2008-08-13T17:56:00.000-07:00

The last three months have been an adventure to say the least. so here's some bullet points to get caught up.

IDM is in place and working like a well oiled machine, had a few bumps (hung partition during the install, but we got through it.

we went live with it back in June. IT just flat out works, we have password sync with our AD side, and edir is now the "authoritative" source for the AD.
it even sends the admins emails when they make an AD account that doesn't have an eDir counterpart.

Slowly got the core servers up to NW6.5Sp7 with all the patches. Thinning the herd out a bit (see below) and then will get everything up to spec.
Created a NW6.5Sp7 cluster (2 node) on IBM Blades. This is our second cluster as we had a NW6.5Sp5 one for groupwise already (6 node). We'll be migrating file servers to the cluster's SAN storage starting this weekend. SCMT doing it's job as always.
Suffered a eDir replica hung in split state 0 again, dealt with Novell support, took a few sessions with dsdump to correct the issue. Things seem to be ok now, but we're going to avoid creating any more partitions for the foreseeable future. As our Novell Consultant put it during the IDM implementation " you have enough partitions and replicas to run an eDir with over 1,000,000 objects in it and you only have 20,000" So we'll let this lay for a bit.
iFolder!! Finally got it working again, so the two of us who use it have it again. I needed to manually remove all the schema entries for iFolder and then do a reinstall, still was getting "Global Initialization needed" error messages on the console. Went through the forums for a bit, figured out that the ifolder_server agent ID's password was expired, changed the date, cycled iFolder and viola~! iFolder is back. Can't wait to get onto OES2-SLES and try the 3.6 version now. People are starting to ask for it when they see it on my machine, boss will decide whether or not we take this out the "skunk works" or not. Hopefully he does, it's a great win for our group
Having some issue with LDAP authentication with a HelpDesk App, they have the cert and an ID for accessing, LDAP all works from my end, but they keep having issues.
Patched the Groupwise cluster to Sp7. We've been having some random issues with the cluster nodes going comatose for no reason, still researching the issue.

So that's the last 3 months in a nutshell, no other Novell admin at work, so at least the days go quickly.

It does what it says on the tin.....

2008-05-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

Novell's Server Migration and Consolidation Utility does exactly what it is supposed to, the only improvement I would like to see if that it would move any applications as well as the file system. Took about 6 hrs to copy 600GB of data from the failing server to the new one, but it went well. Novell is coming next week to assist in deploying IDM3.5...should be interesting

Panning Out

2008-05-08T08:30:00.000-07:00

2 weeks into this, and the first crisis starts. One of the Novell servers has been failing dramatically on full backups....as in the server panics and shuts down the the volume, kicks everyone out and won't reinitialize the external array unless you do a "reset server". This has been happening for 2 weeks, which means two weeks of no full backups...oy....

ok need a need a plan.....

Move server to SAN device and a new server with the Migration Utility....

woot....

Last Man Standing

2008-04-05T08:45:00.000-07:00

Stuff happens, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's good. Today was bad....

My boss walks into my office and tells me I know have to concentrate 90% of my work on the Novell side of the farm due to a change in staffing....

90%....

ok so let's see how this pans out....

A Bit of a Purpose

2008-03-07T21:20:00.001-08:00

So over the years I've blogged about a number of topics elsewhere, but this one is a good place to be my professional blog. I work as a SysAdmin for a large Healthcare Provider in the North Eastern part of the country. I spend my day knee deep in both Windows and Novell and am going to write about that here....starting with...

Time!
(or how I stopped hating the Domain Controller)

When I took this job, I had a few weeks to look around, one of the things I noticed was that everything was taking a long time to sync up. A quick poke or two at some systems and I discovered that the entire network had up to 15 minutes of delta between the various systems, so I set upon my way to rectify the situation. Originally the various networking groups did not communicate well and when they set up their various systems they all did the best practice for time management, but none of them used the SAME system, in fact one SysAdmin was setting his boxes by his wristwatc. After many meetings, several weeks and much fretting about things,
the plan went through and now they have a delta of about .1 seconds....and we were actually able to see what was truly broken...

Just a beginning.....

2008-02-04T08:55:00.001-08:00

Not sure what exactly I'm going to use it for, but this is where I'll be using it.