Iomega NAS - Drive Failure and Replacement Drive Won't Start Rebuilding

First off, let me say how disappointed I am in the ix4-200d product. I've had it a year in a half and was initially hoping to use it for testing and virtual machines. Its slow performance via SMB and iSCSI made it useless for these features. I was lucky to get 20 MB per sec during my initial testing.

I've used it for backup of my workstation using robocopy in a scheduled task once a week of all my primary partitions ever since - a sort of peace of mind backup system. I also had set this unit up for e-mail to notify me of any issues or RAID issues.

I received an error of disk 3 failing a few days ago and contacted Iomega. Longer story short - register the product within 90 days of purchase and save your proof of registration or Iomega will throw you in the cold.

My colleague gave me a used 1.5 TB disk and used it to replace the failed disk. After turning the unit back on, and logging into the web interface, I received this error:

So, I clicked I agree to overwrite, but once again I was greeted with the same error over and over.

No big deal, I have SSH access from playing with it previously to configure Ethernet teaming (to squeeze more speed which did nothing). Here's a tutorial to enable SSH - http://iomega.nas-central.org/wiki/Root_access_enabling_(Home_Media_CE)

• Connected via SSH to the unit
• Scanned the disks associated to the LVM - pvscan
• Confirmed the my new drive by inspecting the partitions with - cat /proc/partitions
  
  
• Cleared the new disks partition table, which happened to be sdc


• fdisk /dev/sdc
• o
• w
  To clear the existing partition table and then write the changes
  
  
• Reconnected to the web interface and after authorizing the overwrite of the disk once last time, I was able to see the RAID begin repair and rebuilding using my new disk.
  
  
  
  

Okey Mcsmokey Skiddly doo!

Dell EqualLogic and Dell KVM Not Reporting to Orion Syslog

UPDATE: It appears this issue was resolved in Orion NPM 10.4.1. We were on Orion NPM 10.4.0.

As an added tip, make sure you have your Orion Syslog Rules Tag the entries it touches, so you can easily confirm when a rule is actually running against a message or not when you search in Syslog Viewer.
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I've been adding more of our systems to our syslog service. It allows us to trigger events based off of message patterns and severity through our Solarwinds Orion SyslogD service - part of their NPM (Network Performance Monitor) product.

Added all of our Cisco device with no issue, but when adding our Dell 2162DS KVM, I couldn't find any entries in the Syslog Viewer on Orion. Hmmm... so, I shrugged and moved on to our Dell EqualLogic SAN units (models PS4000xv)... none of them reported either. Now, what the fudge?! I setup a little Java based syslog system on another system, and I noticed it worked fine, but it was missing the "Message Type" variable.

After opening a case with Solarwinds and sending them screenshots and Wireshark captures of the missing messages, they offered a simple solution. So, again, here it is to share:

1. Open Program Files\Solarwinds\Orion\SyslogService.exe.config file in Notepad
2. Find the string <add key="UseCollectorEndpoint" value="True"/> and change the value to false. E.g., <add key="UseCollectorEndpoint" value="False"/>
3. Save the file and restart the syslog service

Presto! You'll get the missing messages. I imagine this is somehow bypassing the validation of properly formatted syslog messages, but until Dell (and whomever) start sending the messages with Message Type, this work around seems to work just fine.



Dell KVM Bad Login Test



Dell EqualLogic Login Test

Let me know how it works for you.

Happy New Year

I've been posting pretty slow with updates. Work and my personal life has been keeping me super busy. I also started on an Pinewood Derby Arduino Project (http://www.miscjunk.org/mj/pg_pdt.html) and that has kept me running in the mouse wheel most of the holiday.

Here's a list of a few how-to's I'd like to share with everyone this year:

• Configuring Trunked / Multiple Tagged VLAN / EtherChannel for ESXi 4.1 to Stacked Cisco 3750X
• Configuring Trunked / Multiple Tagged VLAN / EtherChannel for Cisco 3845 Integrated Service Router to Stacked Cisco 3750X
• Using Excel to help prepare Cisco switch configurations
• I've built the CDMA via SCOM 2007 R2 script into a multi-system input that uses queueing folders for inbound messages to erase issues with SCOM getting backed up with outbound messages (which the first example I gave exhibits) It has been pretty stable with this design.

Until then, may we all work hard, be honest, and be prepared.