Month: July 2009

This marks the 10th anniversary of my leaving DC. 10 years ago I moved from the DC area to Nashville, TN to start grad school. Except I didn’t make the trek alone. Because the total amount of my personal belongings out-sized the carrying space of the car, which was another in a series of outdated Oldsmobiles that I drove around in my youth, getting all my stuff down to Nashville required two drivers.

Weed volunteered to take off work, and drive down with me, caravan-style, to Nashville. I led the way in a rented truck and Weed followed behind in the clunker. It’s not a short drive to Nashville, about 10 hours. We left early in the morning from Fairfax, VA and got to downtown Nashville by sundown.

I wanted to thank Weed, 10 years later, and let him know that his act of generosity is not forgotten. Like most guys, I don’t do thank you cards, we just post on the net.

So Dell contacted us a few weeks back and told us they would love to remote into our MD3000i Storage Array (hereby referring to as the “SAN”) and update its firmware.

Sure, we told Dell. Love to have ya!

So some scheduling took place, and emails were sent notifying of downtimes, and backups were made, and they day came and Dell updated our firmware.

And ye old SAN box would no longer respond to pings. So our ESX hosts could find their precious VMs, and for those of you who’ve never had a ESX host lose its VMs, that’s BAD.

So the troubleshooting began. The SAN are on their own VLAN. The ESX hosts connect to a LAG on the switch that trunks to said VLAN. ESX hosts can happily ping each other, so the VLAN is set up correct. If I plugged a laptop, configured on the same subnet as the SAN, into the one of the network cables plugged into the SAN, it could ping the ESX hosts. So the network cables weren’t bad.

So we called Dell support, and we got a lively one . I could tell from the beginning of the call he wasn’t going to be our savior that night, so I continued troubleshooting while he placed us on hold to “check with someone else” (read: smoke some more chronic). I changed the ip addresses of the iSCSI hosts to something else and back. I disabled the iSCSI controllers and re-enabled them. I rebooted the array. I turned off the VLAN tagging on the iSCSI ports.

Voila, the answer! I had set the switch ports where the SAN attached to untagged VLAN access mode. Apparently, if you set the SAN to set a VLAN tag on its traffic, it would work before the firmware upgrade, but not after. Afterwards, you either have to turn off the VLAN tagging on the SAN, or set the switch port mode to tagged. Otherwise network no worky.

If anyone out there knows which way is the correct behavior, I’d love to know. We were using a PC Dell 6248 as our switch.

Anyway, we figured it out before our wonderful Dell tech, so we sent him on our way, rescanned our iSCSi HBAs on our ESX hosts, restarted the VMs, and were back in business.

My $.02 Weed

For the first time in many, many years, my wife and I are taking a road trip right now. The kids are staying with grandparents for a week and a half, and we decided we wanted to take this time to enjoy one another and take a vacation. We swung through Las Vegas to Bakersfield, and now Santa Cruz. We had a few objectives on this trip: spend as much time together without our kids as we could, and make a memorable trip as cheaply as possible.

To that end, we are driving my Honda Insight. I discovered that — at 80-90MPH with two people instead of one and a trunk-full of baggage — my car’s usual 50-55MPG plummets to around 32-39MPG. It ramps back up if I’m willing to drive 55 instead of 83, but what’s the fun in that?

Las Vegas this time of year can best be described as “hellish”. With temperatures regularly above 115 degrees Fahrenheit, people in town rapidly flee from car to air-conditioned casino like they are escaping a downpour. On the positive side, however, I tossed three dollars into the “Megabucks” slot machine, and received six dollars as a winning. That’s pretty much the extent of my gambling efforts. Statistically speaking, your chances of winning a one-in-several-million reward aren’t much different if you play once or a hundred times.

Our stop in Bakersfield to visit Nash & Timi was uneventful and full of reminiscing and hanging out. Timi, unfortunately, just had an ovary removed a few days ago, so our plans to go out together were squashed due to her recovery. Christy & I finally saw a movie we’ve planned to see for the last decade or so — “The American President” — and had some wonderful Chinese food while marveling at how much our friends’ children have grown. I received a few compliments on the changes to my physique as a result of my bodybuilding and diet efforts. I’m still nowhere near where I want to be, but it’s a huge ego-boost to have friends you haven’t seen for years compliment you on your progress. Nash is into paintball, so we checked out a paintball store and a couple of hobby stores while in town. In truth, Bakersfield is smaller than Salt Lake City, so the experience of little tiny mom-and-pop stores is just about the same as back home.

Then we went five hours north to the mountains of Santa Cruz to visit an online friend named Mario. Mario and Christy met several months ago and quickly formed a friendship based upon their mutual efforts at higher education and vast dissimilarity otherwise. Neither of them seemed to fully believe the lifestyle the other described! But here we are, and despite our cultural differences, we’re enjoying our time together. Mario loaned us his RV for three days so that we can day-trip on the cheap to various places around the Santa Cruz/San Jose/San Francisco area. We haven’t made any firm plans so far, but at this point hanging out eating freshly-laid chicken eggs and enjoying the fresh mountain air has been great.

I know it’s a bit of a travelogue, but I wanted to catch you up on where we are and what we’re doing!