Graphing Sonicwall VPN Tunnel Usage

I have the need to track the network usage between each of our offices. We currently use IPSec based tunnels across the Internet for connectivity between all of our offices (we use a full mesh configuration). I looked around for way to monitor and graph the data for these tunnels off our Sonicwall firewalls, but [...]

Managing Your FLEXlm Licenses with Cacti and phpLicenseWatcher

So you are tasked with managing multiple FLEXlm based software license managers, but you want more than a dump of the current license information into a text file or in some horribly written and truly user-unfriendly Windows GUI. Then I have a couple of web based open source products for you, and while the installs [...]

NetApp In Operation

We have now had our NetApp FAS3020c storage equipment successfully in operation for the past 3+ weeks. Everything seems to be working wonderfully. The perform is at least as good as we used to have although some of branch office folks claim that it is slower. We even experienced a disk failure during this time. [...]

Monitoring NetApp with Nagios and Nagiosgraph

With the installation of our new Network Appliance (NetApp) filers, I needed to be able to monitor them. Yes I know that they have an autosupport feature where they email you as well as NetApp whenever anything happens, but I still like to do my own monitoring.
The first thing that I did was check at [...]

NetApp Install – Part 1 – Opening the Boxes

Today is the start of our NetApp installation, so I’d thought I’d document the process. The started to arrive a little over a week ago and I must admit that I’m currently not that impressed. I don’t know where the problems started (with NetApp directly or with our reseller), but we’ve had one issue after [...]

Cacti’s Painless Network Monitoring

For the past week I’ve submersed myself in the world of Cacti, and have been have a lot of fun making cool graphs. As my staff will attest, I’m really big into monitoring anything and everything on our network. I find it’s very helpful to be able to track usage, capacity, growth, and a bunch [...]

NetApp Could Learn From Cisco

NetApp could really learn something from Cisco. Cisco offers all of its product manuals and documentation to everyone. In order to get access to NetApp’s documentation, you have to apply to their NOW (NetApp On the Web) site. In order get the necessary level of access you need to supply a serial number.
We are trying [...]

Storage Assessment, Datalink, and Rick Shangle

Way back in February we had a Datalink “an information storage architect … [who] analyzes, designs, implements, and supports information storage infrastructures that store, protect, and provide continuous access to information” come out to our site to perform a Storage Assessment. During that process they looked not only at the systems we currently have in [...]

Goodbye Dell, Hello NetApp (almost)

I’ve been writing about how Dell’s PowerVault 220s are junk for quite awhile now. We experienced our 3rd major crash for the year this week. We had everything restored and back in operation 23 hours later.
In the meantime we brought in a data storage consultant to analyze our storage infrastructure. They presented a detailed report [...]

The 4th Time (Why I Hate Dell)

Well, we’re at it again. For the 4th time in six months our lovely Dell PowerVault 220s drive array has died on us. What a piece of junk these things are. The pattern is the same as before (even with the patch that supposedly would fix our problems). A drive goes bad in the array. [...]