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Background setup:

This site has VMware vSphere 5.0 hosts which are connecting to NFS datastores on a NetApp SAN/NAS.  There is a dedicated switch stack of Dell PowerConnect 5524 switches between the NetApp and the VMWare hosts.

Issue description:

Over the last couple weeks I have been seeing where VMWare virtual machines would pause or in some cases disconnect sessions.  The Windows event log would consistently record an Event ID 129 with a Source of LSI_SAS: "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued."  I did some further research and found that this event is usually generated when there is high I/O on the SAN.  However, the SAN at this location wasn’t experiencing high I/O. 

I started to notice the following NFS disconnect error while I was logged into the SAN:
nfsd.tcp.close.idle.notify:warning]: Shutting down idle connection to client (192.168.1.10) where receive side flow control has been enabled. There are 0 bytes in the receive buffer. [more]

Resolution:

Per NetApp’s best practice document, flow-control should be disabled on the storage network when using modern hardware.  I had flow-control enabled on the switch and the SAN and this apparently was causing the disconnect issues. 
http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3749.pdf

A review of more than 200,000 4-digit PINs used on mobile phones revealed the following as the most common (in order):

1. 1234 (used by more than 4% of the sample group)<
2. 0000
3. 2580 (straight down the middle of the keypad)<
4. 1111
5. 5555
6. 5683 (spells LOVE)
7. 0852 (straight up the middle of the keypad)
8. 2222
9. 1212
10. 1998

The 10 most frequently used PINs represent more than 14% of the total sampled.  Thus, with this distribution of PINs, you have a 1 in 7 chance of guessing the correct one in 10 tries. [more]

Years are always popular when coming up with a 4-digit PIN (see number 10 above).  So, birth year, graduation year, etc. would also be a good guess if these are known

Regardless, it's a very good idea to recommend people NOT use these particular PINs (at least the first 9 plus predictable years).

I had replaced the power supplies for the blade enclosures for a customer.  When they had all been replaced, I noticed that one enclosure had power warning for all but two blade servers.  I rebooted one thinking it would clear the alert, but it certainly did not.  I researched the issue on the HP website to no avail.  In desperation, I shut down the server blade completely, waited, and then restarted the server.  That finally cleared the warning.  I shut down the rest of the blades, and then turned them back on and all of the warnings had cleared.

Vertafore performed an AMS360 software upgrade and not one of  the client systems would function properly. The problem was seen on physical PCs located in the main office. None of the View desktops (multi-user Virtual Desktop environments) used by remote users had the issue that was seen in the main office. The vender said it was a permissions issue, but after trial and error it was determined the problem was not a permissions issue. By comparing the affected systems with the View desktops that worked properly after the upgrade,  we found that for some reason the information in the Local folder in the users profile was not getting the updated settings. To resolve the problem CoNetrix performed a reboot; logged in as the administrator and removed the users profile. Then uninstalled and reinstalled the AMS workstation client, followed by logging  the user back in, which reloaded their roaming profile and rebuild the Local and Local Low profile folders. When we would login to AMS as the user, the system check would run as it should and add the updated DLLs and information to the users Local profile folder. After these steps were completed, each user’s AMS worked as it should. However, the process also required repair of each user’s Zixmail and Zywave installations due to rebuilding the Local and Local Low folders.

All the repairs were completed without elevating the user’s rights.

Also as stated above, none of the multi-user Virtual Desktop environment systems had this problem.  After the Internet Explorer 9 upgrade, each of the View systems were recomposed which removes the user’s profile and rebuilds the user’s Local and Local Low folders on first login.

An article by lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com/5896093/use-an-analog-alarm-clock-to-disable-forced-screensavers) showed how someone discovered a new use for an analog alarm clock.  The second hand registers as movement if the mouse is placed on top of the clock (see picture below) when not in use.

So, if you are inspecting the workplace and see a mouse perched on top of a clock, this may be the reason. [more]

A customer reported a problem with one of their users not being able to get email on his iPhone. His  phone would setup his account successfully, but when he went to the mail app, it would say “The connection to the mail server failed.” The customer tried setting up another user’s mailbox on his phone and it work correctly. I setup both accounts on my iPhone and saw the same results. I checked his account in Exchange to make sure ActiveSync was enabled. After some research, I found that the user’s Active Directory account must inherit permissions from the parent folder for email to sync.

To change this setting, first open Active Directory.

Enable Advanced Features – (View > Advanced Features).

Find the user’s account in Active Directory and open the Properties.

Go the Security tab > Advanced > Check “Include inheritable permissions from this object’s parent”. [more]

Click Apply and close Active Directory.

Refresh the mail app on the phone and mail should start flowing.

Bit Locker encryption on my new laptop asked for a recovery key every time I booted the system. Nothing had been changed within the system to cause this behavior. In an attempt to stop this from happening I un-encrypted and re-encrypted the drive. When the re-encryption was complete I rebooted and it asked for the recovery key. I went into the Bit Locker settings and suspended the encryption and reboot without an issue. I then re-enabled the encryption, reboot and it did not ask for the recovery key again. So if your system begins prompting for the recovery key. Disable and then re-enable Bit Locker and it resolves the problem.

This applies to any e-mail accounts setup to get e-mail using POP3. 

A customer that uses an e-mail account provided by their ISP for work was frequently having new e-mail rejected because the mailbox was full.  Looking at the storage space on the ISP’s website, they were limited to only 20 MB of e-mail storage.  They usually would have to delete e-mails on the ISPs website in order to receive new e-mails again.  The customer also had been setup to connect to the ISP’s server using POP3 in Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Outlook was configured to save e-mails to a local PST file on the hard drive.

In Microsoft Outlook, open the “Account Settings” for your e-mail account.  Click on “More Options” to view more settings and select the “Advanced” tab. [more]

With POP3, you can give Microsoft Outlook the option to “Leave a copy of messages on the server”.  If this is unchecked, new e-mails received at the ISP remain there until Microsoft Outlook downloads them.  After it downloads the e-mail, the e-mail is deleted on the ISP’s mail account.

An important thing to remember is that the local PST file needs to be backed up regularly because all e-mails will be lost if the PC crashes, PST file becomes corrupt, or you want to change PCs.

Do you remember playing those games where you would look at two seemingly “identical” pictures and try to spot the 5 differences between the two? I’d like to play that, except there’s only one difference between these two:

Here’s the situation. We’re hosting files off of a CIFS share on our NetApp device. We needed to back up this CIFS data using Backup Exec. I went through and set up NDMP on both the NetApp and Backup Exec so that the communication could be established for Backup Exec to connect to the CIFS share and grab a copy of the data. In order to get the resource credentials to show successful, I had to set the Logon Account for the NetApp to be our domain Backup Exec Service Account (BESA) and the actual CIFS share to be the NDMP user account I had created for backup.

Secondly, there is another gotcha associated with how to set up the NDMP account for backup. If you use the root account, you can simply use the regular password as if you were logging into the NetApp device from the backup server. However, if you decide to create a new account, you must encrypt the account on the NetApp device. To create the account, do the following:

useradmin user add <login_name> -g “Backup Operators”
(Type in the password)
ndmp password <login_name>

The output after the password is what you will copy and paste into the backup server so that the NDMP user can authenticate.