About Me

My name is Dan Frith.

I am married with two children. I currently work as a Cloud Solutions Architect at VMware.

In my spare time I like to collect accreditations, play basketball and listen to records. You can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Mastodon, and Twitter. If you’d like to get in contact, and enjoy filling out simple forms, then the contact form below might be just the thing for you.

28 Comments

  2. Pingback: Brendon Davis » Blog Archive » Dynamic Disks Are Evil

  3. Hey Punk ass, legend blog dude. The video clip is freaking awesome…… When you get a chance, stream http://www.cfox.com. Sick tunes right down your ally.

    Latah

  4. Hi …
    I read your clariion-cx700-flare-recovery-part
    I would like to do the same with my completely clean
    cx 300 …
    I have 1 head fully functional and another clean
    So how can i get a copy of the flare from the 1st one to put in the 2nd one ? Your article is self explanatory but miss (or maybe too dumb to see) how to obtain the code ..

    please make me know (in private if you wish)

  5. Hi mate.

    I just got one CX500 and guess what? Same thing..
    Where can i download flare? Looked everywhere and i can’t find the damn thing..

    Should i bin my Clariion?

    Kind regards,

    Alex

  6. Hello Dan,
    This is your boss, I’ve been wondering what you do in your spare time.
    Who would have thought you liked storage stuff:)
    B

  7. Hi Dan

    Couldn’t write a comment on your article because it was disabled, but thanks for writing about QNAP RAID brokenness.. I read a lot of material before attempting and yours included some of the best stuff. I used mdadm –assemble –scan to auto detect the drives, and its rebuilding now. Fingers crossed..

  8. Dan,
    Thanks for your comment – and I hope the recovery goes to plan.
    Cheers,
    Dan

  9. Hi, I read your post about repairing RAID brokenness. However I need some help. How do I know which hard disks i have to assemble (you did sda3, sdb3, etc.)? I’d be very grateful if you could help me urgently!

  10. Hi Tobias,
    The order of the disks corresponds to the letters, so /dev/sda is the first disk, /dev/sdb is the second, and so on. Hope that helps.

  11. Dan,

    I have an edit for the script in the ‘DIY Heat Map’ for EMC Clariion Arrays.

    My edit makes it compatible with the Clariion AX4 array to compensate for the lack of BUS data.

    Email me and I’ll shoot it to you to pass on to your friend and share with others.

  12. You are amazing. Your instructions for flare upgrade are far better than any done by the manufacturer. Thank you!

  13. Thank you VERY much for writing the 3 articles about the Clariion recovery… this was the ONLY resource for information i could find with actual answers… Excellent resource… i just wish i could recover my Flare OS.. while going thru the process listed.. its obvious its corrupted… my thoughts are, can i replace one drive at a time and let it rebuild? is there a rebuild option or is it automatic?

  14. Hi Gary,
    Glad it’s been useful for you. It sounds like you need to use the ftp recovery process to get back up and running. There’s not a lot of point replacing disks as they rely on FLARE operating to invoke the hot spare process. If you could e-mail me and explain what you’re seeing I might be able to give you some more useful advice.
    Cheers,
    Dan

  15. Hello
    I’ve read on a comment about your post “Latest FLARE 26, CX700s, NST and processor utilisation” that Dave was able to enable write cache on a cx300 without SPS. In a lab environment i’m trying to do it, but without success… can you help me?

    Thanks in advance
    Spillo

  16. Hi Spillo,
    I’m sketchy on what Dave did exactly, but I imagine he would have used EMCRemote to access the console of the SP. Fire up a command prompt, then run
    flarecons d f a (for SP A)
    then I think it’s either
    setcache -b 0 (to disable the BBU) or
    setcache -nosps (to override SPS state).
    Obviously you do this at your own risk.
    Cheers,
    Dan

  18. Pingback: penguinpunk.net » EMC – My dog ate my SPS but I still need to use write cache

  19. Hi Dan,

    Our company recently received a EMC cx700. I tried following your tutorial, but I cant get the the Utility Partition to boot. I get the following error:
    DL waited 1s for discovery

    Target 0 is online
    Target 1 is online
    Target 2 is online
    Target 3 is online
    Target 4 is online

    ErrorCode: 0x00000213
    ErrorDesc:
    Device: BOOT PATH
    FRU: STORAGE PROCESSOR
    Description: Data Directory Boot Service Not Loaded Error!
    EndError:
    ErrorTime: 09/20/2013 01:14:30

    No errors lights are showing on the SP. Any ideas ?

  20. Hi Tyler,
    Thanks for getting in touch. Nothing obvious springs to mind, but I’ll be near a computer in 2 weeks and will see what I can dig up then.
    Dan

  21. Regarding your post about jumbo frame, you must also set MTU > 9000 on the switch side because it needs to carry additional informations. That’s mandatory if you are reporting VLANs up to the ESX host or storage system. Bst practivce is 9000 on ethernet ends and 9216 in the switches

  22. Thanks Yann, I’d wondered why the MTU had to be higher on the switch side of things.

  23. Dan, I have some changes for the heatmap program. Please send me a email for where I can email the changed file to.

  25. Hi Dan
    Could you tell me that are the instructions for connecting to a Clariion via serial service port and it’s passwords (SHIP_IT , …) the same with VNX?
    Thank you

  26. Hi Bahman,
    To connect to a CX3/4/VNX, your COM settings need to be set to 9600/8/N/1 with Hardware flow control. If you’re connecting to a VNX2 (Rockies), the BPS setting needs to be set to 115200. Depending on what you’re doing will dictate the passwords you need, but I won’t publish a bunch of passwords here on the off-chance you’ll need one of them.
    Dan

  27. FLARE 26 ran Windows XP embedded. FLARE 28+ is Windows Server 2003 x64. You can use EMCDialer (modified VNC clniet) and point it to your CX/CX3/VNX SP IP. The knowledge of this is rather uncommon, but clariion1992 is still a valid login.

  28. If EMC is serious about maknig Isilon the Flagship for the NAS big data market, they HAVE to release the appliance. It is usually the first contact we, power users / SAN and NAS enthusiast get with a product. I know I usually don’t recommend to my company that we purchase a product before I can get a few hours of lab on it.I promise I won’t be asking for anything else for Christmas

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