Uncategorized Archives

Secure Logging from vRealize Network Insight

February 11, 2020 / Martijn / 6 Comments

By default, the syslog capability in vRealize Network Insight only supports UDP on port 514, sending the messages in cleartext. It’s important to have Network Insight send its logs somewhere, though, as they can be useful when troubleshooting Network Insight itself.

To be clear, these logs contain information about the Network Insight platform and collector appliances. Logs on processing incoming data, errors when the collector is unable to connect to a data source (vCenter, switch, NSX, router, etc.). If you’re looking for logs on network changes (the network that Network Insight monitors), look at the System and User-Defined Events… Read more

Exchange 2010 SP2 – New-MailboxExportRequest not found

August 21, 2013 / Martijn / 0 Comments

When I read about the new powershell cmdlet New-MailboxExportRequest, I was very excited about it (because I was planning a migration for a few mailboxes).

After having to manually install several required hotfixes (some of which were related to .NET 2.0 (what the hell MS?)) and running through the SP2 upgrade process three times..I was much less excited: whatever I tried, the cmdlet that triggered me to upgrade, was nowhere to be found.

Turns out, the cmdlet does not appear to exist in the powershell-sphere, if you do not have the proper permissions (must be easier to hide commands … Read more

Changing ESXi 5.1 Service Console VLAN ID via PowerCLI

August 8, 2013 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Today I had the need to remove the VLAN ID from 60 ESXi 5.1 hosts. Instead of doing it 60 times manually through the KVM, PowerCLI was enlisted for the job. That wasn’t the hard part, the one-liner is quite simple..For those interested:

Get-VMHost | Get-VirtualPortGroup -Name "Management Network" | Set-VirtualPortGroup -Name "Management Network" -VLanID 0

As mentioned, this wasn’t the hard part. It appears that vSphere 5.1 has a (pretty cool!) new feature that checks whether a network change has an impact on the connectivity of the ESXi host (like changing the service console VLAN ID or IP address) … Read more

New UCS Blade Server on older UCS Firmware

February 22, 2013 / Martijn / 0 Comments

When expanding your UCS environment, Cisco will deliver your new blades with the latest firmware. If you’re running an older firmware on your UCS setup, this could cause an issue with the blade discovery.

If the new blades are hung on the discovery process with BIOS POST issues, the following message can appear in the FSM tab of the server:

Waiting for BIOS POST completion from CIMC on server 1/1 (FSM-STAGE:sam:dme:ComputeBladeDiscover:BiosPostCompletion)

This can happen when then blades firmware is newer than the firmware available in the bundle installed in the UCS Manager. The easiest way to recover and complete your … Read more

Fixing MySQL slaves with Percona xtrabackup

January 1, 2013 / Martijn / 0 Comments

For a very long time, fixing MySQL slaves was a tedious task. Slaves died, replication fails, tables would get out of sync and you’d have to import all the (consistant) data from the master database. Depending on the importance of the slave, this could mean downtime for your master while exporting.

MySQLdump is usually the application one uses to execute this task, locking the tables while exporting. For me, having a database readonly, is downtime. However you look at it, if your website is not 100% useable, it is experiencing downtime.

I came across Percona’s xtrabackup utility a while back … Read more

Twitter reviews 2011

February 7, 2012 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Twitter is one of the webservices I deeply admire; simple, easy and scaled to the heavens. They did a review of 2011 with statistics that reaffirm that scalability. A few examples:

UEFA Champions League: 6,303 tweets per second
MTV VMA: 8,868 tweets per second
Steve Jobs’ passing: 6,049 tweets per second

Check the entire list and other 2011 highlights here: http://yearinreview.twitter.com/en/tps.html

Using this site.

May 3, 2009 / Martijn

Yes, you read right. Instead of using this domain just for email and my servers, I am going to use this site. Probaly just going to be handy articles (for myself), backend scripts, pictures and some time-wasting games.

I have too many separate systems (dns, backups, monitoring, etc), of which I was sick of a week ago. It’s a wonderful mesh of it all.