CCNP BCMSN study notes

 

http://www.movement3.com/docs/CCNP-BCMSN-Notes.pdf

DOS batch to check if OS is x86 or x64

Here is a quick way to check if the OS is 64-bit or not. This will be very handy as I am writing more SCCM packages for deployment and will need to perform this check.

@echo off
if “%programfiles(x86)%XXX”==”XXX” goto 32BIT
echo 64-bit Windows installed
goto END

:32BIT
echo 32-bit Windows installed

:END

http://www.msfn.org/board/there-test-determine-64bit-32bit-t122513.html

Edit: 05/28/2010

Or you can read this registry key:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment\PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE

Found this tidbit on http://portal.sivarajan.com/

Updating EqualLogic firmware and other iSCSI errors

The other nite, I upgraded the EQL firmware from 3.3.3 to 4.1.5. Over the past couple of weekends, the Hyper-V host server dropped its EQL volume. We think this is due to the weekend full backup. Couple of interesting notes:

The update process for EQL is pretty straight forward, FTP the tgz file to the EQL box. Then telnet/ssh into it and issue the update command. For some reason, it did not take when answering with a “Y” in the Windows telnet session. I tried logging in with Putty and the update worked without any issues. That wasted like 15 minutes in a tight outage window.

When I tried to installed EQL HIT 3.2 software, I got this message:
The following file is in use.
C:\Program Files\EqualLogic\bin\EqlEventLog.dll

I ran Process Monitor and saw in the system calls that it was trying to delete the EqlEventLog.dll file, but couldn’t. I renamed it and ran the install again and it worked.

The Hyper-V server got the below error message every 3 seconds in its event log. After installing HIT 3.2, the Favorite Targets had duplicate entries for a volume. I removed it and the error messages stopped. I *assume* the duplicate entries were always there, but the iSCSI initiator properties box did not show them.

Log Name:      System
Source:        iScsiPrt
Date:          9/9/2009 8:31:53 PM
Event ID:      5
Task Category: None
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      server.domain.com
Description: Failed to setup initiator portal. Error status is given in the dump data.

IBM and Dynamic System Analysis (DSA)

Everytime I go to the IBM website, I can never seem to find what I am looking for very easily. I remember I needed to find drivers for our tape drive and it took me 20 mins just to locate them. Anyhow, IBM has a cool inventory tool called DSA. Just search for DSA and download the portable version. The readme file was also very helpful.

Here are the basic commands:
ibm_utl_dsa_xxxxxxx.exe -v -ux => This will create HTML files in C:\IBM_Support folder. It will also run the UpdateXpress and tell you what firmware/drivers you need.
ibm_utl_dsa_xxxxxxx.exe -v -x -i C:\IBM_Support\name.xml.gz => This will extract your .gz file and create HTML files.

Finally, you can download the UpdateXpress tool and it will download and install drivers and firmware for you. It is a very cool tool.

Jumbo frames

Here are some short notes:

Switches can support both Jumbo and standard frames. So if your switch is configured for Jumbo frames, but your server is not, that should be OK.

However if your server NIC is configured for Jumbo frames, but your switch is not, that can create errors. After more research, I decided not to implement jumbo frames. From various online searches, you will probably gain less than 0.5% improvement. If our EQL shares continue to drop during the weekend backup, I will then configure jumbo frames.

http://www.bitplumber.net/2009/03/how-to-configure-jumbo-frames/