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VMWare Storage Filters

Skit — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 02:02:09 +0000

During a recent server maintenance window, I came up against the VMWare Storage Filters. Unfortunately I wasn’t aware of them at the time. What this left me with was a LUN that was listed as available unused storage for all ESXi Hosts in the Cluster but could not be added as an extent for an existing Datastore. I could not for the life of me figure this out at 7pm on a Friday.

LUN Hide'n'Seek

Come Monday morning after a coffee and a bit of research I had solved my problem. VMWare storage filtering will filter out LUNS if that LUN is; already in use, referenced as an RDM or not available on all ESX Hosts. It was this last condition that made me wonder. I had rebuilt a sandbox ESXi host to ESX to make use of NetApp’s mbralign tools, but I had not reconnected it in vCenter. This host reference was left offline and moved outside of any clusters in vCenter. This lone offline ESXi host was what was blocking the clearly available LUN being listed as an available extent!

Morale of the story: anything registered in the vCenter will be in play, regardless of state or location of the object. More on Storage Filtering is available in the vSphere Online Library.

Perth’s Huge Hail Storm – Photos and Video

Skit — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:20:02 +0000

What a drive home yesterday afternoon, here’s the photos and tweets I posted.

"Racing this home"

"I think the storm is winning..."

"Got home in the middle of the first wave"

"Storm won :( That's my backyard starting to flood. Storm drains got up to 3/4 full"

"Single hail stone stuck to my car roof"

" The hail has kicked up all the moss between my pavers. :)"

I was caught in a huge storm over Perth. Drove half of the way and sailed the rest. Streets were flooded all over the place and with the lightning going crazy many intersections were without power. Arrived home safely (thanks for opening the shed @Mrs_RB!), thankfully our home was in good shape. Seeing as we pulled the power to most of the electrical equipment due to the lightning, our only source of communication was our mobile phones. Right when I was on the phone to a colleague the phone dropped out and it was a good while before I got reception again. At this point the weather was very calm outside. I thought I’d see if I could get the Perth Weather Radar up on my phone to see what the storm was doing, this is what I saw.

eep

See that lovely clear bit in the middle? That’s where I was. See that crazy coloured bit above just covering Perth CBD? That come in about 20mins later, bringing with it more of the craziest weather I have ever seen in Perth. I also around this time got a MMS from the colleauge I was talking to earlier showing all the stained glassed windows at UWA’s heritage listed Winthrop Hall smashed. :(

Winthrop Hall Photo by frenchiephish

Heading into work this morning things didn’t seem too badly affected near home. Lot’s of signs of flooding the streets and only a few tree branches down. It was slowly becoming apparent how badly hit UWA as the roads were littered with more and more debris the closer I got. Below are my photos of some of the areas around UWA.

UWA Carpark - There's a car park here somewhere...

UWA - Pathway cleared by storm water

UWA Reid Library Lawn - There's normally a pathway here...

UWA Reid Library Lawn - Thick debris covering the Reid Library lawn

UWA Reid Library Lawn - Where the debris came from, this was a very thick foliage tree yesterday

Fallen tree at the UWA Arts building

Clock tower at UWA Winthrop Hall, didn't fair well

Nor did any North facing window for that matter...

Some more coverage of the Perth Storms around the Interwebs:

Youtube: UWA ALVA Library Flooded
ABC: Rain, hail, lightning – pictures from Perth’s severe storm check out the lightning hitting a crane in the CBD!
7 News: Nightly News 23/03/2010 check out the storm front rolling in at 1:13
perthnow: Mudslide swamps luxury apartments
perthnow: Gallery – Chaos as Storm Hits
perthnow: Gallery – Perth counts cost of million-dollar storm
Flicker matt.didcoe: UWA Storm
Flickr tanarama: UWA Engineering Carpark and UWA James Oval
IAAML Blog: Storm in Perth Yesterday awesome photo of the storm front rolling in

I hope everyone survived this crazy storm okay.

Free Antivirus – Avast! 5

Skit — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:48:25 +0000

For quite some time I have been recommending avast! Antivirus to Friends, Family and Colleagues to protect their personal computers. It’s simple, covers all bases and easy to maintain but most of all it’s free!

I was glad to find out recently that they’ve just released their latest major version of their free Antivirus product version 5. They’ve made it easier to use and it looks so much better.

Changes I’m glad to see:

Simplfied layout in program window
The previous layout was far to confusing, I had trouble every time I launched it…
Easy access to Boot-time Scan under ‘Scan Computer’
My must suggested fix for viruses on a computer, as it scans your disk for viruses before Windows starts making it possible to delete them.
Gaming mode
Supresses notifications when a full screen application is launched
Easy to see protection status
Nice big letters and colour right up the top so you know everything is running and up to date

If you’re not running antivirus or your currently paying for virus protection I’d strongly recommend avast! 5. Download it here: http://www.avast.com

Movember 2009 – Mo Grown

Skit — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:51:01 +0000

Movember is over, was great fun and a great feeling to be an offical Mo Bro this year. A big Thank you! to those who donated, final tally was $30 raised individually and a great effort from the team at work raising $270.50.

I’m a little short of words, so I thought I’d leave it up to the photos to do the talking. Enjoy :)

Vodafone and 3/Hutchison Merger Followup

Skit — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:16:51 +0000

It was announced back in February of this year that Vodafone and 3 were to merge, in a hope to be more competitive in these troubled financial times. My comments on the proposal was initially bleak, but in light of some more recent news my thoughts on the proposal are coming around. The news in question is the article on Whirlpool “3 set to utilise Vodafone network”

The access to Vodafone’s 2G network is in addition to the announcement back in April that 3 will roam onto Telstra’s NextG network. ie. When your out of the 3′s CBD coverage, you’ll get the advantage of using Telstra’s wide country coverage. However should you use any data on Telstra’s network it will not be included in any caps. At present the additional usage charge is $1.60/mb, under the new Telstra NextG agreement the roaming data charge will be 50c/mb. This is still quite high, but I do like the fact that I can still get coverage in the country areas of Western Australia for Voice and SMS.

So where is the advantage of gaining access to Vodafone’s 2G (or Voice/SMS/Slow Data) network? The original Whirlpool article suggests that data usage on the Vodafone 2G network will be included in 3′s cap. However what will my phone do when it can’t find 3′s 3G network? Will it drop back to Vodafone 2G or Telstra NextG? Whirlpool Forum members are seeing the Vodafone network appear as “3″ in addition to “3 (3G)”. Perhaps the SIM will instruct the phone to choose anything with “3″ in the network name. This also bring’s 3′s coverage to a mix of their own 3G (Voice/SMS/Fast Data) in the CBDs, Telstra’s 2G/NextG and Vodafone’s 2G in the CBD / Country. I also wonder if this will have any affect on the Telstra NextG whilst roaming agreement ?

Enough of me brain dumping for the morning, time to get back to my email and coffee.