I\’ve been writing about troubleshooting issues for a while now and one of the things that is very difficult and most time consuming is correlating events between host systems, switches and storage arrays in the even of storage related errors. My advice has always been the same. Hook everything up to NTP systems, make sure […]
Time with and without NTP on FC switches Read More »
In Fibre-Channel, and many other network protocols, the use of CRC (Cyclic Redudancy Check) is adopted to detect corruption of frames. Be aware of the word \”frames\”!! As I explained in previous posts there are two layer of link integrity, an 8b/10b encoding/decoding algorithm (on 10G and 16G FC it has been changed to 64/66)
For numerous years entire bibles have been filled with storage design concepts, pro\’s, cons, benefits, cost structures on port-counts vs. performance etc. however whenever I get to see a fabric overview of what is connected to what and how stuff goes back and forth between initiators and targets it always (well around 99% of the
Fabric design, the good the bad and the ugly. Read More »
Pretty often you get into some sort of mode whereby I forget that there are many youngsters getting their feet wet in the storage arena and some things are hard to grasp on. Traffic flow is one of them so here we go.
Buffer Credits for Newbies Read More »
Sigh….. yet another post to debunk some FCoE marketing and explain in some more details why FCoE is not good for Business Continuity (or business in general).
Why FCoE is bad for Business (Continuity) Read More »
Due to an (yet) unknown cause it seems the webcomponent of the Host Connectivity Manager in Brocade HCM (the agent part of the adapter driver) has placed an incorrect value in the abyss (webserver) configuration file (abyss.conf). The \”ServerRoot\” entry points to C;\\hbaagent whereas it should\’ve pointed to \”<install dir>\\BROCADE\\Adapter\\driver\\util\\hbaagent\”. The issue happened in this
Brocade HCM on Windows does not start Read More »
A fair number of people have reported that when they want to provision storage to a host this doesn\’t seem to work. Only after bouncing a FC port or rebooting the host these LUNs become visible. Others reported that it only works when they provision LUNs and zones in a particular order. So how is
Unable to provision new Luns (and how to solve it) Read More »
Do you get nuts about these user-names and passwords you need to remember across all these different systems, platforms and applications. LDAP or RADIUS is your friend. When you make a mistake however it can also be you biggest enemy. Brocade offers you the option to hook up a switch to LDAP or RADIUS for
Brocade AAA authentication problem Read More »
Very often I get involved in cases whereby a massive amount of host logs, array dumps, FC and IP traces are taken which could easily add up to many gigabytes of data. This is then accompanied by a very synoptic problem description such as \”I have a problem with my host, can you check?\”. I\’m
5-minute initial troubleshooting on Brocade equipment Read More »
A buddy of mine posted this article and it reminded me of the presentation I did for the Melbourne VMUG back in April of this year. The first law of the Time Lords | Aussie Storage Blog: If you have ever worked in support (or had the need to check on events in general as
The first law of the Time Lords | Aussie Storage Blog Read More »
