Changing Management IP of Compellent Storage (SC4020)

 The following has been tested against 2 SC4020 appliances and been found to be an effective method of gaining access to the appliance in a new network.

Situation: Two appliances had been moved to a new network and their management network had not been reset. Thus management through the Dell Storage Manager was not possible.

Assumptions: You need to have a console TRS cable, understanding of a terminal client to use said cable, and the admin password. If you don't have the admin password you can make a fat32 formatted disk, make a file named unlock.phy and put the contents of "unlock Admin" on the usb disk. Once that has been made put the USB drive in the controller you connect the TRS cable to. This is not necessary if you know the password for the Admin or another full admin account. You will also need the IP address, your subnet in the form of a netmask, and gateway IP address of the new network.

Process:

Open a terminal client on your com port and hit enter until you receive the login prompt.

Log in with "Admin" (this is case sensitive).

For password use your known password, if you had to unlock use "mmm" as the password.

Once the prompt has dropped to "sn#####>" use the following commands:

shellaccess developer

ifconfig inet eth0 <your IP here with your / netmask at the end>

    IE: ifconfig inet eth0 192.168.0.10/24

ifconfig inet gateway <your gateway address here)

    IE: ifconfig inet gateway 192.168.0.1

That's it. Your management IP address should now be able to be ping'd. After that you will need to use the Dell Storage Management Client to connect and you can change the other controller through that interface, or you can repeat the process above on the 2nd controller. 

I did notice on both of my appliances that the top controller reverted back once I could get into the storage center, so double check that before changing the VIP address on the controller if its giving errors about "failed to modify object" when attempting to modify the Appliance IP. 

Clearing Out Shoretel ShoreWare Gear (T1k / SG90 / SG30)

I find myself needing to reset a bunch of Shoretel Shoreware gear for my job and needing to compile a bunch of different resources in order to get what I truly wanted. I wanted factory defaults and a 'zero'd out' configuration as well.

I did not have any dedicated voicemail switches in this configuration so take that into consideration when zeroing out your gear.

Start with your favorite telnet client, I use Putty.

Set your com to the appropriate com port and baud rate to 19200. No other settings in putty needed changed.

Connect your serial cable (or usb to serial adapter, something like this: https://amzn.to/387ki1W).

Power on the switch, or powercycle it.

As it boots up you will be looking for "Hit any key to stop autoboot: <countdown>"

Press any key to enter a command line, which will have => as your prompt.

To zero out the config enter these commands sequentially (or if you're lucky, copy and paste everything and it will all go in, I wasn't).

setenv flags 0x0
setenv ipaddr 10.0.0.1
setenv gatewayip 10.0.0.1
setenv netmask 255.0.0.0
setenv serverip 10.0.0.1
setenv host 10.0.0.1
setenv cntrlsrv 10.0.0.1
setenv autoload FLASH
setenv dns1 10.0.0.1
setenv dns2 10.0.0.2
bootc static flash vxworks
saveenv
reset

This sets all ip variables you can set as the login account, but much faster than navigating the menu, even copying and pasting each line.

Once it reboots, I check to make sure its valid by logging in with the following credentials:

User: anonymous
Password: ShoreTel

The password is case sensitive.

Then selecting 2 to make sure it shows the configuration set above.

That's it, if you're e-wasting these like we were, put them in a pile!


Sources (none of these had an exact copy and paste of the above, mine is slightly customized from all of 3 of these combined):
https://www.facebook.com/178036116151911/posts/how-to-factory-reset-a-shoretel-switch-sg-220t1aconnect-to-the-switch-via-a-seri/319857388636449/
https://info.lantelligence.com/technical-blog/2013/05/15/changing-shoretel-switch-configuration-via-serial-cable
https://www.shoretelforums.com/forum/shoretel-tech/administrators/72217-factory-reset-shoregear-90-and-t1k

Prevent Excel from Refreshing Data When Copying and Pasting

Problem:

When copying dynamic data out of excel when pasting the value pasted changes.

Solution:

Change the setting in excel to perform automatic calculations:

File tab -> options -> Formulas side tab -> Under the calculation Options, workbook calculation, select manual. Optionally you can shut off recalculate workbook before saving depending on situation.

Source:
Co-worker and tested with my own application.

Recursively Reset Permissions in Windows Path Using iCacls

Situation:

Need folders and files under a specific folder to regain all inheritance from the specified folder.

Solution:

Run the icacls with the recursive and reset switches:

icacls <folder> /reset /t

/t = recursive
/reset removes any modifications from inheritance in the ACL. By default, folders will inherit their permissions from the folder above them.





The final step in this is to give the primary folder that you want to push inheritance from down through the folders the appropriate permissions, all child folders will then have access as intended.



Primary Source:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22327776/using-icacls-to-set-permissions-of-a-folder-to-inherit-recursively

Minecraft / MineOS End of Stream Issue

So I was recently working on a project to bring several servers into a single consolidated server that would allow my friends to join me, play on servers, but not have to have my desktop running 24/7 for that to happen. So I bought a server to run MineOS on but I want to run multiple versions of minecraft, including some serious changes in version (FTB/Tekkit) all the way to Vanilla. So during testing I was working with a vanilla server and a copy of the tekkit server. Once I finally got past the firewall issues (of which you can find the fix here) I ran into an issue with connecting to my vanilla server on a non-standard port (25564 and 25563). Well I found out something interesting, the tekkit game seems to be fine with connecting on the default port (25565) but not on alternate ports when connecting to a newer version of the game on those other ports. So I received an end of stream error from minecraft in tekkit while connecting.


SOLUTION:
Run Vanilla minecraft launcher with vanilla minecraft games and tekkit launcher for tekkit games.


Dumb... I know.... this took me a while to fix so I wanted to document it. There does seem to be multiple other possible issues with end of stream errors but this seemed to be the big one. Hope this helps someone else out.

d3dx9_43.dll is Missing

This is actually a two fold issue for my specific case.

My issue: Launching a game like World of Tanks or some other game that requires D3DX9_43.dll crashes with a cannot be found error

My sub-issue: When attempting to install DirectX Redistributible the error is given "directx an internal system error occurred"

How to fix it:

First you will need the DirectX redistributible: Get it here

Second, if you get the sub issue I had, you will need to modify the registry. Go to:

HKLM>Software>Microsoft>

IF a sub directory called DirectX does not exist, create it. If it already exists, modify the code called "version" to be anything other than what it is. I changed it to "installedversion" and re-ran the installer which then completed successfully. 

Windows Backup to ESXi Virtual (B2V)

My problem: 

I have a backup from Windows backup (Server 2012 in this case) that I wanted to restore to an ESXi virtual machine.

My Sub-Problem: 

I could not get an NTFS mounted drive to mount into ESXi for the windows recovery system to work properly.

How I solved it: 

I created a virtual machine within Hyper-V which allowed the backup drive to be direct mounted. Ran through the restoring backup solution, then ran the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone to convert the Hyper-V machine to a virtual on the ESXi Server.

Things to consider for this project:

Requires two physical servers, not including the downed server. One of which running ESXI the other running HyperV, this cannot be a virtual machine of a HyperV server unless you can raw map the backup drive into that virtual machine (if anyone has any way of doing this and not requiring the HyperV server please comment).

Requires having storage space on the HyperV larger than the total hard drive space of the downed server.

Requires upward of a day's worth of time to complete even on high end hardware. It can require more time if there is large amounts of data being restored and migrated. The more data involved the longer the process. The lag I was getting seemed to be related to how fast the storage drives are, since I was using backup disks on a simple Raid 1 on sata drives the performance was low. The disk creation time took 100% active time on the disk at 60-80MB/sec.


My in-process problems: 

•  The backup drive on the Hyper-V server must be "offline" to be mounted within the VM for cloning. 

    Solved by putting the drive offline through disk management.

• The restore would not function because the destination drive in BIOS is too small. 

    Solved by creating a fixed disk which exceeded the backup size instead of a dynamic disk in the virtual machine settings (I had to create a 250GB fixed disk which required a fair bit of time so if it goes fast (A minute or less) and you have a larger sized disk, you will need to go back, it created a fixed disk by deleting the disk you just created, which should take around 400k if you haven't installed anything, and making a new disk and be sure to select fixed size). Your description should look like this (I originally created a partition too small explained below):

I later found out the error code I was getting (shown below) means that the target drive is smaller than the original backup drive which is required to be bigger by microsoft's backup system.

I then expanded my drive from 200 to 250 since my original drive was 236 (240GB SSDs) and retried.

• When attempting the restore of the system, the search for a recovery file would take forever.

I was not able to find a "resolution" for this issue. I just bounced back and forth between find and refreshing the image searcher (Microsoft why can't we just target a file? Waiting is ridiculous for system admins, we know what we are doing (usually)). 

• When I first got the P2V conversion completed successfully I ended up accidentally creating a hardware version 10 virtual machine. 

When I did so and got reminded that 10 is not capable of being managed through the vsphere system, I ended up restarting the rebuild process after deleting the virtual machine due to hard drive size limitations on my destination server. It turns out that there are some pretty simple ways to fix this. Most of them are detailed here but the last one just blew me away in frustration: 

• Create a new virtual machine with required hardware version and attach the existing disk from the virtual machine.

So simple yet so frustrating after you already dedicate yourself to starting over from scratch. Yet again, lesson learned.