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Infrastructure Design
Oct 06 2009
VMware Virtual NIC Choice and SYSPREPing Templates Print E-mail
Written by Paul Winkeler   
Tuesday, 06 October 2009
Under ESX 3.5 an enhanced NIC choice called vmxnet became available but only to 64-bit VMs. The idea behind this new virtual device is that by publishing itself as TCP/IP offload capable, the Windows OS will not bother to encapsulate data into a TCP/IP packet before handing it to the ethernet driver, instead leaving that task to the (virtual) hardware. As a result, the vmxnet device no longer has to parse and strip the TCP/IP packet information so it can hand the payload off to the *real* physical NIC and everybody wins.

This improvement was big enough that numerous VMs have been changed to 64-bit even if the guest Windows OS was still 32-bit; all just to gain access to that more efficient NIC. But guess what? No good deed goes unpunished and indeed neither does this one. When one of my customers came to me a few weeks ago with a scenario that prevented her from SYSPREPing a VM she tried to create from a template even after installing every SYSPREP CAB's contents into all possible folders, we, as well as VMware support, were stumped. Finally we discovered that the reason the option to customize the template deployment was grayed out was because of the mismatch between a 64-bit VM and a 32-bit guest OS! All we had to do was convert the template to a 32-bit VM and everything worked as advertised.

My biggest gripe here is that the VMware GUI gave absolutely no feedback to this effect. None. Zero, Zip, Zilch. Ah well, live and learn.

Last Updated ( Tuesday, 06 October 2009 )
 
Sep 04 2007
IBM to OEM Cross Reference Print E-mail
Written by Facts Totum   
Tuesday, 04 September 2007

SAN and NAS devices

IBM OEM
Product NameModel-Type OEM NameOEM Product Name
N-Series 33002859-A10 and A20 Netapp FAS 2020
N-Series 34002859-A10 and A20 NetappFAS 2040
N-Series 36002862-A10 and A20 NetappFAS 2050
N-Series 37002863-A10 or A20 NetappFAS 270
N-Series 52002864-A10 or A20 NetappFAS 3020
N-Series 53002869-A10 or A20 NetappFAS 3040
N-Series 55002865-A10 or A20 NetappFAS 3050
N-Series 56002868-A10 or A20 NetappFAS 3070
N-Series 60402858-A10 or A20 NetappFAS 3140
N-Series 60602858-A22 NetappFAS 3160
N-Series 60702858-A11 or A21 NetappFAS 3170
N-Series 62102858-C10 or C20 NetappFAS 3210
N-Series 62402858-E11 or E21/C21 NetappFAS 3240
N-Series 62702858-E12 or E22/C22 NetappFAS 3270
N-Series 76002866-A10 or A20 NetappFAS 6030
N-Series 78002867-A10 or A20 NetappFAS 6070
N-Series 79002867-A11 or A21 NetappFAS 6080
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 16 August 2011 )
 
May 06 2004
Linux WinModem (a.k.a. LinModem) Support Print E-mail
Written by Paul Winkeler   
Thursday, 06 May 2004

List of vendors and their associated driver support information gleaned from the net.

A good summary of the state of Linux support for WinModems is also available at Modemsite.com although you cannot download anything from them without paying a subscription fee.
A well-maintained, open site on all things LinModem is maintained by Jacques Goldberg at Technion University in Israel.

 
Mar 16 2004
Linux Email Scrubbing on a Budget Print E-mail
Written by Paul Winkeler   
Tuesday, 16 March 2004

Once an organization finds itself relying more and more on the timeliness and cleanliness of its inbound e-mail, it is time to introduce a centralized e-mail server into the infrastructure. There are many commercial solutions out there but in this article I will briefly describe how to build such a server out of purely Open Source Software (OSS).

The server, of course, will run Linux. (PBnJ Solutions uses RedHat but you can choose any distribution you prefer.) The stock server install will get you all the sendmail pieces you need but just to be sure, look for the

/usr/share/sendmail-cf
directory to ensure you have the sendmail configuration tools you will need to build your e-mail routing rules.

Our sendmail routing rules will make use of procmail for final delivery by way of the SpamAssassin spam filtering routines, but prior to that, all e-mail will be inspected for viruses using Virge. Virge can be configured to use a number of different virus signature checking tools, our preference currently being the TrendMicro set. So the other two tools you need then are the trophie daemon which acts as an interface between virge and the TrendMicro scanning engine library (Look for the section headlined InterScan Messaging Security Suite.)

To stay current, regular downloads of the signature file are required. TrendMicro's website publishes these here.

For more details on how to write your sendmail routing scripts, set the appropriate file ownership on the various libraries and daemons and finally configure a secure imap server to read the e-mail store, please read on...

Last Updated ( Wednesday, 25 April 2007 )
 
May 16 2003
StorageTek T9940B Performance Data Print E-mail
Written by Paul Winkeler   
Friday, 16 May 2003
The fine folks at SA/N, Inc., publishers of the annual Mass Storage Report since 1991, have chosen to incorporate StorageTek T9940B tape drive performance data gathered by PBnJ Solutions. The data highlight the need to take Host Bus Adapter (HBA) performance and even PCI Bus capacity into account when designing tape backup solutions since these drives are able to write at speeds up to 70MByte/sec!

Specifically the equipment used in testing T9940B througput was: