Planning racks and cabling using Visio

For years, HP has been offering on visiocafe.com Visio stencils that help plan not only the racking and dispotition of your servers, but their cabling too. Everything, from blade servers, to SANs, to power distribution units is available. The drawings can be made quickly in a matter of minutes and every component uses the same scale. I can compare the stencils to a bunch of Lego blocks.

By preparing myself in advance using these stencils, I've been able to greatly reduce the the time it takes me to perform physical installations and evaluate precisely how many cables are needed before going on site. This is especially useful when dealing with unmanned data centers where things need to be done right on a unique visit. If you're not familiar with Visio, it is easy to learn, and I can assure you that you'll save time in the long run.



I also use the stencils when drawing maps of my environment, especially network-centric ones. By using the "real" device images instead of white boxes, I end up with maps that are readily understandable by IT staff and they look great!

O.

Quick start with the HP-UX CIFS Client

I've been slowly migrating web servers from IIS over the years to HP-UX Web Server Suite to benefit from increased PHP performance, and a need has come up to access data stored on a Windows share.

The HP-UX CIFS Client is an OEMed version of Objective Development GmbH's Sharity which is a software that lets you mount Windows shares on a variety of platforms. I don't know the specifics but it used to be a userland tool, and HP has extended it to to make it a kernel module. The engineer in charge of the CIFS client actually posts once in a while in the ITRC forum.

The CIFS client is already built in the default 11.31 installation, so there is no need to install it. It is very easy to use. It uses a clever hack to manage who owns files in the CIFS mount: your users log on independently to the CIFS server, and will be able to see the whole filesystem as their own.

In a nutshell, here is how to mount a CIFS share. Your HP-UX box doesn't have to be in a domain.

1. Obtain from your Windows admin a login/password to an account authorized to use the share

2. Activate the CIFS client
# vi /etc/rc.config.d/cifsclient
RUN_CIFSCLIENT=1
# /sbin/init.d/cifsclient start

3. Create a mountpoint and mount it
# mkdir -p /cifs/myshare
# mount -F cifs myserver:/myshare /cifs/myshare

At this step, the filesystem is mounted but it is not possible to access it. You first need to have a UNIX user log in to the CIFS Server using cifslogin, then access to the share will be possible. You can do this as root but it is better to use an unprivileged standard user.

4. Log in to the CIFS server as an unprivileged user
# su - user
user$ cifslogin -U winuser -P winpassword myserver

5. Save the user credentials in the CIFS datbase so they can be reused automatically next time:
user$ cifsdb myserver

6. Return to root and save the share the CIFS database so it can mount automatically next time:
# cifsdb /cifs/clsweb_donnees

This should enable the share to remain mounted across reboots. It is also supposed to work if the Windows server reboots but I have not tested it yet. Those of you who would prefer to use the automounter to mount shares dynamically can also do so, which can be useful if you have a bunch of home directories to take care of.

O.

Using Gartner's Magic Quadrants

When evaluating security products, one way to go is to check out what Gartner has to say. I found out last week that they produce yearly what they call Magic Quadrants on a variety of products, and this can help you choose which ones you're going to look into.

Here is an example of such a Quadrant, using made-up products:

Of course, being inside, or outside, of the Quadrant doesn't mean ANYTHING to me. I'm not evaluating here the veracity of the Magic Quadrant, just its purpose. When choosing software, I prefer "going with my heart" when I can.

But there are cases where using the Quadrant can be of help. For example, if I happen to like Gorbatcheck and it turns out that it's favorably placed in the Quadrant, that's another thing up my sleeve that I can pitch to management. It's also a good ticket to my own peace of mind as being backed by Gartner gives a sense of immunity if the product turns out to be below expectations.

There is also the case where Gorbatcheck might be based on an open-source product, let's say Gorbrafree. Of course, Gorbafree won't be in the Quadrant, but the Quadrant can be used to give more credibility to Gorbafree over something less stellar such as GZK. If you're on a tight budget, that's a way to introduce Gorbafree until you're ready to move on to Gorbacheck.

How do you obtain these quadrants? Try Wikipedia!

O.

HP-UX 11i: Mission-critical UNIX

HP was announcing that webcast for weeks, and I decided to check it out. I had seen the one from last year and I didn't find this one much different in terms of presentation or content. The detailed results of the report are here.

First, if I recall correctly the study is done on a sample of around 250 people, give or take, I don't remember the exact number. That's not, in my opinion, a high number. But they insist on the fact that the answers come from data center IT tech staff, not CIOs, which at least comforts me as a systems administrator.

According to the study, UNIX(r) is still alive and well and still a strategic OS, but mostly in the enterprise. I insist on UNIX with capitals and the registered trademark, as they didn't include Linux in that category. They only evaluated AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX which are the "big three" Unixes left. I can resume the presentation to this: HP is better than the rest, sprinkled with numbers from Gabriel Consulting Group and a few slides I've seen countless times previously such as the OE "Christmas present" diagram and the HP-UX roadmap. Cox also spent almost 7 minutes on Green IT, speaking about how HP is "green" and reduces carboard boxes. Interesting, but maybe a bit out of subject. The presentation is high-level, and targeted mostly at people evaluating a migration to HP-UX more than existing customers. No wonder it's on cio.com!

Dan made a smalll mistake during the presentation. He mentioned that Virtualization was a strong point for the HP platform, and he is right. But he then followed on how the tendency would be to virtualize different operating systems on the integrity platform, all the way from Linux, to Windows, to OpenVMS, HP-UX, and then he hesitated and brought up "Tandem", which Brian corrected as "Nonstop OS". Well guys, I don't think they are plans to run Nonstop on HPVM. If there are, I stand corrected!

I couldn't comment if HP is the "best". I haven't worked on multiple platforms in 6 years. But whenI did work with HP-UX, Solaris and AIX, I preferred HP-UX due to its better management feature then. I can only expect it is still even better now.

O.

To me, it is now true. The web is (almost) the (home) platform

I was holding up from purchasing a new laptop for over 6 months cause everyone told me that Vista sucked. I finally did it last Friday with a brand new one running Windows 7. An HP, of course. All that for a price that was half of what one could pay for an honest espresso machine! And the quarter of an equivalent Macbook (which is why I'm not a Mac user, they're just too expensive).

So what do I think of Windows 7?

Not much, actually. It doesn't seem to be on a suck-o-meter at first glance, which is a good thing. But I simply don't care. I'm not excited. I'm completely indifferent.

Why? Because I've realized that while my previous XP installation had accumulated some useful software over time, I'm not sure this will happen with my new laptop.

Thus why, last week-end while staring at my shiny new laptop, I found myself thinking :

>> Where do I want to go today?

That's a very interesting question.

Windows 7 is sure slicker than Windows XP, but the latter had raised the bar already in 2001 by adding a well-deserved feature that had been missing from Microsoft's consumer Windows line since its inception: it didn't crash.

While I used Outlook Express before, I didn't bother installing Windows Live Mail this time and decided to just use my webmail. I didn't bother shelling out money for Office, as I don't use it much and Google apps works just fine.

My brand new laptop is therefore just an appliance to run a browser. Besides maybe retouching my digital photographs, I simply have not much use for all the processing power, and slick Windows 7 features, of that laptop.

Is the web soon to become the platform for my home usage? You bet.

O.

Old motif habits die hard

Just saw an e-mail today from our development group. They're planning on making a graphical dashboard for our proprietary application which runs on HP-UX. Everything on the backend has been CLI or text-based up until now, with the client running on Windows with MFC. But for that dashboard reserved to application administrators, developing a Motif application came out.

Yes, you read me right, Motif. Whew! Haven't seen development with Motif in a while.

Of course they didn't mean by this they would start develop in Motif right this morning (at least, I hope so). Maybe GTK+ would be more fit, and a good browser-based app would be even better.

My point is that Motif used to be associated with the commercial UNIX flavors for so long that saying "I'll make a Motif app on UNIX" is still a catch-all phrase like saying "I'll transfer files with FTP". Yes, these technologies have been there for a while and still work, but are clunky and outdated... and don't take me wrong, I used to root for Motif! That was in the mid 1990s. The Motif toolkit was, for its time, quite customizable using X resources. The no-frills window manager mwm offered a refreshing, KISS interface that actually worked on a workstation without crashing like Windows95 used to do twice a day.

All that was 15 years ago. Today, everything runs in a browser.

Migrating from OSEM to WEBES 5.6

Here is a post on my experience migrating from OSEM to WEBES 5.6. It went well except for one minor problem with the MSA 2000.

First of all, you should know there are a few outstanding problems with WEBES 5.6, one of them being a security issue. I'm not sure I can disclose what they are as I didn't get them from official channels but I will say that a patch is expected sometime in December. If you don't need to run 5.6 right now in order to support specific hardware, you should stay with WEBES 5.5 and OSEM 1.4.8a in the mean time.

That being said, for those who wish to run WEBES 5.6, you can update it manually from Remote Support Software Manager. Also update to the latest version of Remote Support Eligible system List at the same time. The procedure is documented in the guide WEBES 5.6 and product coverage.

There is also some (redundant) information in the guides A.05.30 HP Insight Remote Support Advanced with WEBES 5.6 and OSEM to WEBES Migration Guide.

To migrate away from OSEM, if you have a standard installation with OSEM populated by info from SIM, it is as easy as simply uninstalling OSEM but you should read the above documents just to be sure. Once OSEM is uninstalled, stop WEBES (not documented, but I did it anyway) using "net stop desta_service" and "net start desta_service".

If you have hundreds of managed systems, it is better to wait at least an hour before testing if everything works well, as it takes a while for WEBES to stabilize and trap events once it is restarted. I also always confirm that e-mail notifications are enabled in order to have an alternate way of receiving notifications in case there is a problem up the food chain in SIM or ISEE.

Now you should test equipment that used to notify OSEM with SNMP traps to be sure they are being caught by WEBES and service events are opened at HP.

Here is what I tested successfully:

Proliant running Windows ... OK
Proliant running ESX ... OK
C3000 blade chassis ... OK
C7000 blade chassis ... OK
MSA2012i G1 disk array ... NO

The MSA 2000 G1 used to work with OSEM but no longer with WEBES. I've opened a ticket at the ITRC to have an official support statement. This is exacerbated by the fact that its events in SIM are reportedly sent as informational so those of you who "follow the red" could miss critical events.

O.