Bladecenter

Well, today I had to grind my head again, regarding the way check_snmp handles WARNING and CRITICAL events. From my point of view, check_snmp is really just retarded sometimes. As you know, all the other plugins accept WARNING and CRITICAL-thresholds based on the calculation, if the return integer is above this threshold it reached WARNING/CRITICAL state. But check_snmp doesn’t play that way. It expects only ranges, which are NOT gonna result in warning or critical events. Which is kinda stupid, since you gotta rethink twice about the thresholds 😛 ...

Well, we finally had our maintenance window today, in which we planned the hardware exchange for our current Dell Blade Chassis (don’t ask!). The exchange went fine, but as we started exploring the components (like the IBM BladeCenter SAN switches – which are in fact Cisco MDS 9100) we hit a few road blocks. First, the default user name/password combo for the Cisco MDS 9100 for the BladeCenter is USERID/PASSW0RD (just as the rest of the password combinations). ...

Today I played a bit with our PE Chassis, or more specifically the DRAC/MC (remote management console). One of the things I’ve been experiencing was that the DRAC/MC was rather slow when browsing on the web interface (as in waiting a minute for the jnlp for the KVM to download). So I went ahead, fired up net-misc/atftp on my notebook, put the firmware update provided by Dell in the TFTPROOT and executed this in my telnet session on the DRAC/MC: ...

OK, I’m sitting now again in train (hrm, I get the feeling I’ve done that already in the last few days - oh wait, I was doing that just on Monday) this time to Berlin. My boss ordered me to attend a workshop covering the implementation of Shibboleth (for those of you, who can’t associate anything with that term - it’s an implementation for single sign-on, also covering distributed authorization and authentication) somewhere in Berlin Spandau (Evangelisches Johannesstift Berlin). ...