For more security you can make your cluster use encryption for inter-node communication with no downtime. Otherwise operations are allowed or rejected based on IP address, hostname, and the cluster rhosts file. And, C-SPOC operations are not encrypted one of the important ones being password changes. Possibly an even better option would be to create a IPsec VPN tunnel between nodes, but I haven’t tested that.
Fixing dead DLPAR
Sometimes your P4 (and maybe P5?) DLPAR goes to lunch and the dynamic menu options don’t appear. To reset everything on the HMC, IBM recommends we run this from the offending LPAR:
/usr/sbin/rsct/install/bin/recfgctIf that doesn’t work, try:
/usr/sbin/rsct/bin/rmcctrl -z
/usr/sbin/rsct/bin/rmcctrl -A
/usr/sbin/rsct/bin/rmcctrl -pList network port speeds
Simple one-liner to list all your network ports negotiated speed:
netstat -v | egrep "Media | \(en"AIX upgrade missing migration option
The Migration Upgrade option is missing when trying to perform an AIX upgrade.
Check the version of each copy of the boot logical volume (hd5). If any copy has the target AIX version or higher, this will cause the migration option to be unavailable.
The King’s Castration
‘Twas the Night of the King’s Castration: the last of the Royal Balls was coming off. All the counts, discounts and no-accounts were sitting around the throne room slinging camel-shit, for in those days, bull-shit was as yet unknown.
Disable Shutdown Event Tracker
Shutdown Event Tracker is enabled by default and supported on all Windows Server 2003 family of operating systems.
Power on/off a blade from the Management Module CLI
If you don’t have access to the web page of the Management Module, or you’re too lazy to walk to a PC, you can ssh into the management module and do it from the CLI.
FastT Network Setup
The procedure to configure the network ports on the FAStT controller is poorly described in the FAStT Storage Manager Installation and Support Guide, but we worked this out. Some FastT’s have a slightly different process to setup the network, but they’re all very similar.
FastT Hot Spares
The FastT has a global pool of hot spare disks, hot spares do not need to be in the same drawer as the failing disk. It will first look for any hot spares defined in the same drawer as the failed drive, then it looks at the last hot spares defined.
FastT Cache Block Size Tuning
The cache block size is the size of each memory block used for caching, the only two options are 4k and 16k. The cache block size should be set to the size of the average work unit, or less. Never exceed the size of the average work unit. For instance, if you are using Oracle with an 8k segment size, you should use 4k. Using 16k will result in each cache block only bing half utilized. Using 4k will use two blocks, but they will both be filled. This can be changed under Storage Subsystem -> Change -> Cache Settings.