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Unable to ping from a Windows Vista host

October 14th, 2010 No comments

We came across an issue whereby a user could not ping from his Windows Vista PC whereas other devices on the network could. This was an easy fix:

In an administrative command prompt:

netsh firewall set icmpsetting 8 enable

This resolved the issue.

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Checking a linux MD raid array

March 15th, 2010 1 comment

Sorry for the long delay in posting.  Illness and long work hours prevented much time for this, but I just wanted to offer this little tidbit…

For those of you familiar with Linux, you may be aware that it supports both hardware and software RAID types.  Naturally hardware RAID tends to make better use of the resources available due to things such as bus and CPU offloading, but software RAID typically leaves you with more control should something disastrous happen.

In this little post I’ll go over a quick-and-easy method of verifying the soft-RAID array.  A lot of sysadmins I know will use mdadm to force a rebuild which is…clunky at best.  I believe the example below to be safer.  In my example, my RAID array will be md0.

fs1:/ # cd /sys/block/md0/md

fs1:/sys/block/md0/md # echo check >sync_action
[Wait a few moments]
fs1:/sys/block/md0/md # cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid5 sdc1[0] sde1[3] sdd1[1]
1953503488 blocks super 1.0 level 5, 128k chunk, algorithm 0 [3/3] [UUU]
[>....................]  check =  3.1% (30306176/976751744) finish=283.3min speed=55672K/sec
bitmap: 0/466 pages [0KB], 1024KB chunk
unused devices: <none>

You can check on the /proc/mdstat as often as you like during the consistency check.  The RAID is up and running during all of this and you don’t have the risk of a disk failing while the array is broken [which could happen during the mdadm method].  Not saying that a disk won’t fail, but if it does then at least the RAID is as intact before it failed rather than definitely being broken!
Comments, as always, welcome.
Categories: Commands, Linux, Tech Tags:

Running control panel applets directly

February 7th, 2010 No comments
I find it a lot easier to run the control panel applets from the Start > Run option, or from the cmd prompt rather than having to navigate Start > Control Panel and then locate the applet I wish to use.
My usual one on Vista and Windows 7 is ncpa.cpl  - very useful for quickly accessing your network card without having to go through the Network and Sharing Center front-end.
I’ve had a few requests on how to launch these tools, what’s available, and what they link to.
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An introduction to sed

February 5th, 2010 No comments
sed is a very handy *nix utility for modifying input streams.  It stands for Stream EDitor and it does just that; edits streams.
Its brothers and sisters include awk and grep, which search for content and rearrange output fields.
Categories: Commands, Linux, Tech Tags: