Whenever things goes haywire on an OS or application there are two areas that are looked at first:
In a fair few cases the issue is founded to be external from the host systems but when it comes to performance related problems from a storage perspective the entire IO-stack is at play.
Continue readingWhen it comes to cybersecurity, it may often feel like a game of whack-a-mole. Where to look, how hard do I need to hit the mole to prevent it from resurfacing again, and how do I know if I’m covered enough so that I’m reasonably confident malicious third parties are not able to do me or my business any harm.
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1Password has proven to be the solution of choice for many organisations and is under constant active development to lead the way with actively collaborating with as well as adopting of industry standards like FIDO2.
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As you may have seen, the first release of my book was published in late September, and I’ve received a great deal of positive feedback. To the ones who have provided me the constructive feedback, I am most grateful, and I’ll make sure these are addressed in the 2023 release.
One of the most asked questions was if I could expand on the Fibre-Channel and NVMeoFC side as that seems to be an area where many Linux administrators, who also deal with storage infrastructure management, have problems with. The main reason people asked is that I’ve been doing this for over 20 years so I must have some decent knowledge on this. They’ve followed my blog for a long time and would like to see the correlation of issues in a FC network and how this propagates onto the various layers of the operating system. Whether this is related to path management, IO issues, security, discovery or other problems that show up on Linux hosts, when it originates somewhere in the FC network it is often difficult to pinpoint the exact location of the issue.
I would be very happy to expand on this and share the knowledge that I have and provide examples with problems and resolutions.
Even though I’ve worked with the most complex and expensive equipment out there, I do not have a $100K home-lab sitting in my study. Recent FC equipment is relatively expensive when compared to Ethernet and there is no such thing as a free-bee Wireshark that can do line-rate FC traffic capturing or injecting errors like we have with “tc qdisc” options. Host bus adapters, a 16G or newer switch that can talk NVMeoF and has FPIN capabilities would already need to have some recent chipset and software. The same thing goes for an FC array.
I’m currently in touch with some good friends in the industry to see what the options are and if are able to accommodate my request. I know from experience that there are hurdles and roadblocks in the form of financial or legal restrictions so I need to take things as they come. I’m grateful for any effort people take to help me out.
If there are past, current or future customers who have “spare/superfluous” equipment in this area and are able/willing to help I would be extremely pleased.
It looks like this post seems to have turned out as some begging exercise, but that is not the intention. I am really committed to provide the best information that I can give to my readers and hope that they are able to prevent, or resolve, storage related issues in a Linux environment as much as possible. Having the proper tools to do that is obviously a prerequisite to achieve that.
If you are able to help and want to get in touch to see what we can do, just email me or make an appointment via the contact page over here.
Kind regards,
Erwin
A while ago, I planned to update my home network for a couple of reasons. As I’ve been working from home for a while, most of the interactions I had with customers ran over secured VPN links but still over the same local Wi-Fi network as everything I had hooked up including a 2 dozen IoT devices of various sorts, media server, speakers etc. As the communication with external parties changed a bit with having a private, employee as well as business links, I needed to change the way I worked. I decided on a few things.
As the field of risks in cyberspace expands more and more, it is imperative to understand these and reduce your areas of vulnerabilities.
From a consumer perspective this mostly touches on a few points:
So what do I mean by the above as these do not seem to be really “consumer” terminologies. Lets go through them one-by-one.
OK, first off, “It wasn’t me !!!” Even though the title may indicate otherwise.
Just in case you’re not in Australia and have no idea what this is about. Optus is Australia’s second-largest Telco, with around 11 million subscribers. On September 22nd 2022 they suffered a major data breach where it was announced that PII (Personal Identifiable Information) data of almost all their customers was stolen. Now, we’re not talking about the phone number and the name, nooo, basically everything that is required to really disrupt someone’s life. This included names, addresses, date of birth, drivers-licence details, passport details, banking and payment information, other identity verifiers like Medicare numbers, and potentially other grade two1 or three details that would allow a person to accrue enough points for online or phone identity verification. Let me be clear here, NO OPTUS CUSTOMER IS SAFE FOR YEARS TO COME !!.
When I asked a buddy of mine, who is a fairly prolific author, what his advice is when I asked him I wanted to write a book, he said “Don’t”. During the process I sometimes wished I’d taken that advice, but as it progressed and neared completion I did feel a real sense of satisfaction. Now, I’m not claiming to be an author and my style of writing is more along the same way I write my blog articles. Just down to earth without any fuss and simply trying to be a clear and concise as possible.
It took a bit longer than firstly anticipated as my previous employer had some issues with me writing such a book as well as the fact that I got diagnosed with some nasty disease I had to conquer, but here we are. I could finally press the “Publish” button.
So what is it about. As the subject says, Troubleshooting Linux Storage.
In my career as a support engineer, I’ve seen many issues popping up in a variety of circumstances at customers’ sites, ranging from very small to very large multinationals. A common factor has been that in many occasions there was confusion of what was actually happening and where any of the problems originated from. Now, I’m far from claiming I’m an expert at any layer of the Linux IO stack, but as I’ve been doing both storage and Linux for a fairly long time, I have a pretty good understanding of where to look when things go wrong, how to identify them and how to resolve them.
In the book, I’ve tried to capture a lot of what I know, and I hope it will help system administrators in diagnosing problems, resolving them and based on these experiences, prevent this from happening again.
Is it a complete bible of everything that can go wrong? I think there would not be enough trees in the world to provide the paper to print it on, nor would you be able to lift the book physically. Even just a Kindle version would seriously be stretching the storage capacity of the device. As always, you have to make decisions on what is useful to write and the necessity to refer to other sources. Most of the things in the book are of a practical nature around the troubleshooting art. It does contain a fair amount of links to other sources where needed.
As this is my first attempt of ever doing such a thing, I did not really want to go via one of the large publishing houses like o’Reilly or Starch Press. Maybe in the future that changes. That also means that from a publishing perspective this has been a one-man job, and you could encounter some irregularities that I may not have captured. When I do these will be corrected asap.
The book can be purchased via Amazon.
[amazon template=iframe image2&asin=B0BFX744GY]
It is also now available in digital format via Leanpub
https://leanpub.com/troubleshootinglinuxstorage
I welcome any feedback, good or bad, and appreciate suggestions, so I can improve the book in future versions and help more Linux system administrators.
Kind regards
Erwin
No, no. It’s not in conflict with itself. It is now physically split up in multiple codebases each for a specific platform.
The standpoint of getting notified when events happen in SAN environments at all costs may need to be reviewed. As many of you know the Broadcom and Cisco switches can customise various thresholds in their respective FOS and NX-OS operating systems.
Brocade uses the MAPS framework which follows a policy based setup.
