Tag Archives: RemotelyAnywhere

EMC – My dog ate my SPS but I still need to use write cache

Posted on by

Someone contacted me via my About page a little while ago to ask how to use write cache on their CX without having an SPS. It’s worth noting that doing this outside of a lab environment is a really bad idea, as the point of the SPS is that you’ll have sufficient time to flush cache to disk prior to losing power to the array. But anyway, in case you missed it, here’s what to do.

Use EMCRemote to access the console of the SP. If you’re using a CX4, you can get some instructions on how to do that here. Fire up a command prompt, then run flarecons d f a (to access SP A). Then run setcache -nosps (to override the SPS state). You should then be able to enable write cache.

EMC – renaming the CX4 SP using natest.exe

Posted on by

We recently had to convert some old CX4-480s to 960s and rename them. For some reason we couldn’t change the names on the SPs or get them to join the Unisphere domain properly. EMC Support used a very useful tool called natest.exe to rename the SPs via a RemotelyAnywhere session. Here’s how to do it. Obviously you should use this tool with caution and only if instructed by support.

Log in to the affected SP with RemotelyAnywhere and fire up a command prompt.

You can then use natest to rename the SP, amongst other things.

Microsoft Windows [Version 5.2.3790]
(C) Copyright 1985-2003 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\clariion>natest
== Main Menu ==
0: Exit
1: Physical Port ->
2: Virtual Port ->
3: Portal Group ->
4: Portal ->
5: Global Props ->
6: Test ->

selection: 5

== Global Props Menu ==
0: Exit
1: Display global properties
2: Set global properties
3: Do full refresh

selection: 1

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

supported: IPv6 VLAN
machine name: ERNIE
domain name:
reboot required: FALSE

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

== Global Props Menu ==
0: Exit
1: Display global properties
2: Set global properties
3: Do full refresh

selection: 2

Enter machine name: BERT

== Global Props Menu ==
0: Exit
1: Display global properties
2: Set global properties
3: Do full refresh

Once you’ve set the machine name, back out of the utility and use Unisphere to reboot the SP. Once it has rebooted you should see the new SP name in Unisphere and you should then be able to join it to the domain.

New Article – Accessing RemotelyAnywhere on CLARiiON

Posted on by

This one’s quick and dirty. I’ve added a new article to the articles page that covers accessing RemotelyAnywhere on the CLARiiON (FLARE 29 and beyond). All requests for the correct usernames and passwords will be ignored.