Changing the time of Cisco DCNM

You’ve just deployed the DCNM appliance and you notice that the reports are displayed in the PDT timezone format. How do you change this into your own timezone?

For this you can log on to the command line of the appliance using SSH.

Check if DNS is working by performing a ping to your favorite NTP server.

To edit your timezone settings use your favorite editor (like “vi”).

vi /etc/ntp.conf

# Use public servers from the pool.ntp.org project.
# Please consider joining the pool (http://www.pool.ntp.org/join.html).
server 0.centos.pool.ntp.org iburst
server 1.centos.pool.ntp.org iburst
server 2.centos.pool.ntp.org iburst
server 3.centos.pool.ntp.org iburst

If you want to use your own NTP server, put a hashtag in front of the 4 example servers in the config file and put your own NTP server in.

# Use public servers from the pool.ntp.org project.
# Please consider joining the pool (http://www.pool.ntp.org/join.html).
ntp.mycompany.com iburst

The “iburst” parameter will try 8 times to collect new time info if necessary, instead of the default, which is only once per interval.

To change the timezone, remove the /etc/localtime file and create a new symbolic link to the file you need.

rm /etc/localtime

The list of location files can be found here:

/usr/share/zoneinfo

for example “Europe/Amsterdam” would be the file /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Amsterdam. You can simply list the available locations by listing the available files in these folders.

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Amsterdam localtime

Now restart the NTP daemon:

service ntpd restart

And check the current date and time:

root@dcnm01 etc]# date
Tue Jun 19 13:22:06 CEST 2018
[root@dcnm01 etc]# date
Tue Jun 19 13:26:00 CEST 2018
[root@dcnm01 etc]#

How to find out the LUN id of a Windows disk

Hard Drive

Attaching multiple LUNs to a Windows host and later trying to figure out which LUN is which can be a drag. I found out that using the “details disk” command in diskpart can help you finding backup the right LUN:

 

diskpart

list disk

select disk 19 (or whatever drive you want to see the details of)

detail disk

HITACHI DF600F  Multi-Path Disk Device
Disk ID: 00000000
Type   : FIBRE
Status : Online
Path   : 0
Target : 2
LUN ID : 7
Location Path : UNAVAILABLE
Current Read-only State : Yes
Read-only  : Yes
Boot Disk  : No
Pagefile Disk  : No
Hibernation File Disk  : No
Crashdump Disk  : No
Clustered Disk  : No

There are no volumes.

 

So in this particular case the Host LUN id was 7. This should help you along a bit 🙂

Dell Technologies World 2018, here I come!

It’s that time of the year again: Las Vegas time! This year I once again got an invite from Dell EMC to visit this yearly conference. It’s less than two weeks before the event, but I already have a full agenda: from networking with the Dutch in the “Dutch Delegation” to a super secret meeting with the Dell EMC Customer Council and maybe even some interviews!

Remember last year? Well, here’s a quote of mine as a reminder:

Let’s see if we can do some more of that this year 😉

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Format of CSV on Hyper-V hosts is very slow

Hard Drive

When formatting a newly added disk (LUN) to Hyper-V, often you’ll notice the formatting takes forever. Dell EMC therefore advises to disable VAAI on VMware hosts for the same issue, however modern VMware hosts don’t seem to have this problem. Hyper-V however still have this issue. To disable the UNMAP / TRIM from happening, use the following command:

fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 1

After formatting was performed, you’ll need to re-enable UNMAP / TRIM by issuing the following command:

fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0

 

How to set the DNS server in a Brocade switch

In order to do DNS lookups in a Brocade SAN switch (for example to read the NTP server’s time), you need to configure DNS first.

By using the command “dnsconfig”, you can configure which 2 DNS servers the switch can use to do lookups:

dnsconfig

Now you see a 4-item menu:

Enter option
1 Display Domain Name Service (DNS) configuration
2 Set DNS configuration
3 Remove DNS configuration
4 Quit
Select an item: (1..4) [4]

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