Archive for category My job

Managing HP P400 RAID card

It’s a summarising memo from the last Saturday.
What supposed to be slowish disk, actually was dead drive on array.
Thanks for the supplier, the entire collection of SAS drives was just waiting to be installed.

It’s possible to configure RAID adapter from the BIOS stage, but it’s more interesting to configure it on the live system. What you need is configuration tools for the adapter card. And they are called “hpacucli”. Ok, ‘CLI” stands for “Command Line Interface”, “hp” is too obvious. “A” could be for “array”. What “cu” stands for?

Debian repository is at http://downloads.linux.hp.com/SDR/downloads/ManagementComponentPack/pool/non-free/.

Get it, install and read on.

Run “hpacucli”, it should be located in /usr/sbin.

To get information on installed RAID cards, use

ctrl all show

The utility can warn you on the recommended firmware upgrade and will print the controller(s) information:
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Case story: move the location of Revit Server 2012 models

Here is the other issue: due to the fast install of Revit Server 2012, the location of model was not important. After the server’s role was changed to “Central” instead of ‘Caching”, i wanted model be stored in more predictable location.

Again, I had no wish to reinstall the whole server, including w2008r2 server.
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Case story: change role of Revit Server 2012 without reinstall

Our company was running a caching Revit Server 2012 instance, to be able to work on a project. The central server was set in the kingdom of far away and was serving three architectural offices.
Recently we had to take care of the model created and the Revit Server 2012 instance itself. I hate to touch working system, but i had to.
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Where is my free space, windows, where is my free space?

I had a strong wish to install Autodesk Revit 2013 just a days ago. Besides it needs 38 GB of free space, it did not fit on my clogged 100 GB system drive.
Too bad. Ok, my drive is oldish 160 GB Seagate, but still, windows7 seems like a disc hog.

So i’ve decide to investigate the case. Using RidNac, i made a small tour to the HDD space. Read the rest of this entry »

Using Revit Server 2012 by non-domain members

The last issue in the Migration Hell was Revit Server. To be precise, not the application itself, but the client authentification.
With all it’s bells-n-whistles, it lacks most part of the documentation. The application itself runs on IIS, uses Windows (NTLM) or Basic authentification, but nothing is said about the Revit client. The only thing you can find – you must login as domain member to use the Revit Server.

It’s not true. You should, but must not.

Two things must be done on the client to use Revit Server:

  1. authenticate in the domain and every server you will need to use. You must use your domain login credentials to authentificate. The AD domain uses trust relations to authentificate you in the domain servers. If you prefer not to login to AD domain, you must take care of it by yourself
  2. change environment variables.
    • %USERDOMAIN% point to the current domain, if logged as domain member. If not, it’s pointing to the computer name. Setting the variable to the domain name needed (eg. SET USERDOMAIN=MYCOMPANY) will do the job. You should not use DNS domain name, eg. MyCompany.COM, it’s set in %USERDNSDOMAIN% and is useless in the case of Revit Server
    • %USERNAME% must be set to your AD’s username, without AD prefix or FQDN suffix. Eg. if your AD domain login is mycompany.com\PerfectUser or PerfectUser@Mycompany.COM, use “SET USERNAME=PerfectUser”.

That’s all. Enjoy.

PS: if you use Local Revit Server, and Central Server is located somewere in the Other Domain, you will probably need to authentificate to the Central Revit Server too. Not sure about this.

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pull

is the only missing keyword, OpenVPN client-to-server config need to work correctly on the client.
It took me 3 days to figure this out, a lot of RTFM’ing and head-banging.

Full client config looks this way:
[ad#ad-lb]
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IPsec to Sonicwall appliance

Just a note:
when you need to establish IPsec connection to Sonicwall NSA 3500 firewall, here’s working config:
Linux side:
/etc/ipsec.conf :


include /etc/ipsec.d/*.conf

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Get rid of removed packages in Debian

Every time package is removed via `apt-get remove`, a tiny piece of its configuration can be kept in your system. If you ever need to reinstall the package, this information can be re-used. These packages has status ‘rc’ in the output of `dpkg -l`. But if you want to keep your system tidy and clean, you may want them to be removed.

The miraculous command is

dpkg -l | egrep ^r | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f 3 | xargs apt-get remove –purge -y

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Running VirtualBox guests from physical drive

Dual boot is perfect solution in most cases.

On the other hand, if you need to peep into the other system’s files, you need to re-boot. Or use sometimes not so stable filesystem utilities.
Running fully virtualized OS, using eg Xen as supervisor, creates additional load an hardware, maybe not too big when running multiple OS’es on the pretty new server, but significant, if it is a laptop. And yes, you NEED to keep data in-sync between virtual and real OS. Read the rest of this entry »

Migration hell: moving printers in Windows

Our campus, Faculty of Architecture, VGTU is moving to the totally new subnet. As we use DHCP for IP distribution, no real problems except `sed` are going to appear.
The pleasing moment is we are getting a fresh IP range.
The headache is TCP/IP printers.

WPKG has good printer addition/ installation guide in http://wpkg.org/Printer_configuration , but it does not cover changing IP port numbers.
As a CEO on all computer infrastructure, I need to find any solution to make the movement smoothly.

I was unable to find a ready-made solution, and in-house tool appeared after several hours in the Net.
I need to apologize for bugs and errors, as it is the first (and hopefully the last) VB script. It uses WMI. Testing box was W7, x64.
Maybe someone will find it useful.

Call the file chprinterport.vbs Read the rest of this entry »