Manually failing a disk on a Dell PowerVault MD3000i SAN Array

Yesterday I had an issue appear in Dell MDSM (Modular Disk Storage Manager), which reported unreadable sectors detected. In MDSM I went to the Support tab and chose gather support information in order to save the support information to a zip file on the server running MDSM.

Inside this zip file was a file called unreadableSectors.txt. This file showed that the disk in slot 5, enclosure 0 was the source of these issues.

We had a hot spare available in slot 14, so before getting Dell to replace the faulty disk I decided to mark the disk as failed and get the Hot Spare to kick into action. Manually failing a disk on a Dell PowerVault MD3000i SAN Array is quite straight forward, but it isn’t something that is available in the MDSM gui. Below is the path to the utility and the command to fail disk 5.
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Our 9 month old boy absolutely loves Pocoyo

Pocoyo Animated TV SeriesOur 9 month old boy absolutely loves Pocoyo! After showing him an episode of this animated TV series on YouTube at around 4-5 months of age he now can’t get enough. We let him watch 1 or occasionally 2, seven minute episodes each day as a treat.

We had shown him Baby Einstein and similar “Baby” oriented videos but the animation in these always seemed too busy and couldn’t hold his interest.

Simplicity is what Pocoyo has and this helps hold his interest. There is no background in the animation, but has instead a few 3D characters on a white screen and simple catchy music.

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Presenting VMware LUNS to a Windows based server using iSCSI

Just finished my Veeam Technical certification online as a part of the “Veeam University”. I was reminded of the issues with presenting an iSCSI VMware LUN to a Windows based server, which is something that is second nature for me now, but I still see it as quite a trap for those starting off with products like those offered by Veeam.

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