Byte sized for when a nibble just isn't enough!
I recently came across a great tool provided by Cisco. I hadn’t heard of it before, or seen it mentioned anywhere I frequent so I figured time to do a quick blog post. Cisco CLI Analyzer (or analyser for the rest of us English speakers) To start with, let’s link to the official page – … Read more
Quite some time ago I created a PowerShell function which allowed one to compare a given cryptographic hash against one locally generated to see if they match. Looking back on the old version (here is a link to the blog article https://www.bytesizedalex.com/powershell-cryptographic-hash-checker/) it is very much reminiscent of old school batch files. I decided now … Read more
If you have ever replaced VMware vCenter server certificates you will know that there are default values for common SSL/TLS certificate attributes, for example country code and organisation name. By default VMware have their own details for these attributes as shown below – Country – US E-mail – [email protected] Locality – Palo Alto Organisational Unit … Read more
This week one of my colleagues has been performing updates on our hypervisor hosts including those running Hyper-V. During this work we received alerts from our monitoring system to indicate two of the hosts had essentially run out of disk space, obviously a little worrying. We stopped the update process while troubleshooting was carried out … Read more
Recently a critical cluster system had a bit of a hiccup wherein the SQL resource failed between nodes a few times and then gave up. Most of my clusters run on Microsoft Server 2012 R2 so I tend to use PowerShell for everything, in this case the cluster is an older one running Server 2008 … Read more
Running two Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T servers for my home lab has required me to learn a new IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) web interface and command language. In this case I’m going to share how to power on a Supermicro server. While it is of course possible to connect via a web browser to the IPMI … Read more
If you have a VMware environment and you haven’t yet deployed the vRealize Log Insight appliance you really should. While the ‘Log Insight’ platform is a licensed product VMware do provide it with a number of free licenses included so depending on your environment size you may not even need to pay. In this post … Read more
The SSL/TLS certificates on my HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) C7000 blade chassis expired this week and therefore required replacing. I’m a strong believer in always replacing certificates with valid ones generated by a certificate authority (CA). In my mind there isn’t much excuse in a business to not have an internal CA for this sort … Read more
I came across this issue while reviewing the output of the checkhealth –detail command run from the 3PAR command line. This command provides a more detailed view (as per the switch) of any health issues including those experienced in the Logical Disk (LD) subsystem. The specific error ‘LDs not mapped to a volume’ may happen … Read more
I recently setup a DNS iApp on the F5 load balancers in my datacenters and felt it was time to migrate the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) 3PAR storage arrays DNS to point to this new virtual IP (VIP) rather than to the static DNS server it currently used. I will demonstrate the command line syntax for … Read more