Cupfighter.net

Equallogic’s are very nice boxes; fast, robust and very scalable (linear!; adding an enclosure adds processing power spindles and cache!). They don’t have licenses to enable features, WYSIWG!.
But sometimes a bit of a “blackbox”. This has been greatly enhanced by the release of the Equallogic SAN HQ Software.
It would be nice however if they would support synchronous replication between two groups, they do support a-synchronous replication though. And if they were a bit more flexible on the networking side by supporting VLAN tagging for example.

For the people who want to have a bit more insights:

SSH into your Equallogic group, login and enter “support”.

Be aware of the following message!

You are running a support command, which is normally restricted to PS Series Technical Support personnel. Do not use without instruction from Technical Support.

When running “cachetool”:

When running “netstat -i”:

IP Statistics:
4137170846 total packets received
183707 total bad packets drop
0 bad header checksums
0 with size smaller than minimum
0 with data size < data length
0 with length > max ip packet size
0 with header length < data size
0 with data length < header length
0 with bad options
0 with incorrect version number
0 fragments received
0 fragments dropped (dup or out of space)
0 malformed fragments dropped
0 fragments dropped after timeout
0 packets reassembled ok
4136987139 packets for this host
0 packets for unknown/unsupported protocol
0 packets forwarded (0 packets fast forwarded)
183707 packets not forwardable
0 redirects sent
5530887305 packets sent from this host
0 packets sent with fabricated ip header
0 output packets dropped due to no bufs, etc.
47 output packets discarded due to no route
0 output datagrams fragmented
0 fragments created
0 datagrams that can’t be fragmented

There are more commands to discover. Try TAB completion and mind the difference between “Bad Command” & “Ambigious command”. These commands are not shown when using “help” and most have a -? or -h option.

AGAIN: ONLY DO THIS ON TEST SYSTEMS AND WHEN YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’R DOING ONLY!… Don’t come whining here if stuff breaks…

This is not so new news, but still want to drop some frustrations here…
While trying to record audio from my system for a screencast I discovered that I was unable to select sound from my speakers (waveout mix, stereo mix or sometimes called “What you hear”). At first I thought this was a Windows 7 issue with my drivers. But upgrading my drivers from the ones supplied by Microsoft to the ones supplied by Lenovo for my T500 did not help either.  So I contacted my buddy Google.

Soon I found some discussion on this topic on several forums including the Lenovo support forums.

Lenovo has an official kb article on this:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-70822&selectarea=SUPPORT&tempselected=5

The solution according to Lenovo:

Symptoms #1 and #2 were caused by a design change agreement between Microsoft and the audio chip hardware supplier. The new change drops the support of mixed-stereo function and direct playback of microphone. The change in design calls to have these function implemented in application level in future. The goal of this design change is to begin standardizing the audio industry. The design change affected all PC vendors worldwide. In the future, Microsoft and audio vendors expect individual applications developers pick up these functions.

The industry has been trying to protect digital rights for ages without much luck so far. And consumers are fighting this with all sorts of workarounds.
So I started looking for workarounds on this one…  since I am not trying to workaround DRM, but just want to create a webcast using sound from my PC. (In this case a demo of the Flash HDX Experience Tech preview of Citrix).

Some Workarounds I found but did not work for my T500 with Windows 7:

• Change driver inf file from crippled drivers
• Stick a cable between headphones out and mic… does not sound like a very good idea…mic-input is mono and will give you terrible sound.. and maybe even blowing up your soundcard (mic’s are passive devices)
• Buy an external Audio card, USB or PCMCIA… but we did not buy quite expensive notebooks to buy extra soundcards…
• Use Virtual Audio Cable

I tried the last without luck either because. The installation went OK but after the installation I got this pop-up:

Mmm, wonder if this kind of driver ever gets digitally signed. This also counts for Vista X64 versions.

Apparently other major vendors, like Dell and Packard Bell introduced the same issues. Dell however fixed it with an driver updated, since they only crippled the driver. But with Lenovo however it seems to be hard coded in the chip (In my case a Conexant High Definition SmartAudio 221).

Rumors go that this was done under the pressure of the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America).

For now I can only record my microphone sound… yeah! I wonder where this goes in the future… and if you have a solution to workaround this issue… please drop a comment, thanks.

The only workaround I found to record “what you hear” is to use Total Recorder Pro, which installs a signed kernel driver to record all sounds. I installed a trial which seems to really work on Windows 7, but I haven’t figured out on how to use this kernel driver to record Audio in other applications. Or use the Physical Cable solution…

More info here:
Lenovo Support forum thread
Ripten on Dell Stereomix issue

The latest firmware 4.1.4 release includes the following new features:

• Support for the PS6000 and PS6500 series models
• Support for SSD devices
• RAID 6 for all array models
• Additional RAID types for the PS5500E
  • RAID 10
  • RAID 5
• Upgrade firmware from GUI
• Windows 2008 Cluster support improvements
• Improvements for IPv6
• Maintenance and fixes

Next to this Dell Equallogic has released management software to monitor the performance and health of your SAN (Finally). Alhought it already supported syslog and SNMP for basic monitoring. I personally think this is very nice additional tooling.