Scott Harney

Parsing NetApp Autosupport Files With Python

In my role as a Consulting SE for RoundTower, I often perform assessments of our customers' storage environments. When those customers use NetApp storage and it's under support, I have a wealth of tools at hand via the ActiveIQ portal to help understand how they use they manage their storage systems and the data they hold. Unfortunately, I often find myself working with customers that I don't have direct partner-level access to their systems via the ActiveIQ portal or the customer has perhaps held some systems well past their expected service life and they're running with 3rd party hardware replacement support only.

Wireguard and pi-hole

For some time now I've had a setup with OpenVPN that provided connectivity back to my house and allowed me to optionally send my internet traffic through the VPN tunnel and my house. Wireguard is an interesting project that provides a simplified peer-to-peer VPN tunnel capability that I've been interested in trying out. Pi-Hole is a project that provides "network wide ad-blocking" by providing a caching DNS server and blocklists.

Digitalocean and Nextcloud

I've been listening to a few Linux podcasts lately and heard some rave reviews of Nextcloud. Dropbox has recently introduced some new charges for their services and this prompted me to take a look at my options to see if I want to continue using Dropbox and start paying for advanced services (more storage, more devices, etc) or do something different. Nextcloud presents an alternative with a lot of the key features and benefits of Dropbox and similar services with the added benefit that I own the service myself.

The USE method for troubleshooting

Julie Evans (@bork) has been posting fantastic little cartoons describing different UNIX commands. I learn a little something new from every single post along with its comments. She posted this little gem about the top command: <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="und" dir="ltr">top <a href="https://t.co/RV51i3K65n">pic.twitter.com/RV51i3K65n</a></p>&mdash; 🔎Julia Evans🔍 (@b0rk) <a href="https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/1022331694811099137?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 26, 2018</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> She then followed that up with a link to one of her sources for understanding top and in particular what the "load average" represents on Linux.

Netapp Transition Migration with PowerShell helpers

Intro I often do work with customers moving legacy NetApp 7-mode systems to current ONTAP. This is termed as transition In NetApp parlance and they provide extensive tools to evaluate, plan and execute a transition. In the ideal situation, NetaApp's 7mTT tool is used to orchestrate all of the transition work. However, customer systems and requirements may not make that entirely possible. Customers may have old 32-bit aggregates and volumes, for example, and they may not want to negotiate an additional maintenance window to upgrade an old 7-mode filer to a new version to gain the capability to update those aggregates to 64-bit.

Netapp post-transition snapshot cleanup with powershell

I do some work with customers transitioning from 7-mode to modern ONTAP (Clustered Data OnTap). When you transition with the excellent 7mtt tool it helpfully transitions snapshots made on the source system to the new system and optionally will duplicate the snapshot schedule on the old system using the new snapshot policies capability. However, the old snapshots from 7-mode are not automatically rolled off. Removal of those old snapshots is left to the administrator.

Some Site Changes

I decided recently to make the switch from jekyll to hugo for my site. I do most of my writing in org mode rather than markdown these days inside of spacemacs . I'd looked into numerous ways of easing the workflow for generating new posts. Since I'm already taking notes in org mode, converting those notes into a post should be simple. But generating the site in jekyll was less so.

New Year, New Job!

With the start of the new year comes a fresh start for me as a Consulting Systems Engineer in the Data Center Infrastructure practice at RoundTower Technologies . My areas of focus including Data Storage and Data Protection. I'll provide pre-sales consulting and assessments not just in Louisiana but potentially throughout RoundTower territory. It's a big step up for me and I'm excited about the opportunity. RoundTower is keenly focused on two things: Technical excellence: We want to bring the highest level of technical knowledge and capability to our customers.

Automating Nutanix Prism VMs

Intro My goal is to explore the Nutanix APIs provided by Prism and Acropolis Hypervisor and automate deployment of AHV virtual machines. I am looking at implementing CoreOS "container linux" VMs with an eye towards hosting applications on a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster for testing and learning purposes. This is similar to working with public cloud (eg. ec2) but in a "private cloud" environment. Nutanix provides RESTful APIs to work with as does coreos and all of its component pieces.

NetApp Insight 2016 Impressions

I did an internal write up about attendance at my 3rd NetApp Insight in a row. ASG decided to publish a variation for public consumption on our corporate blog I was going to write something up on my own site but they saved me the trouble ;) Quick take, I was pleasantly surprised that there was so much new and different to see this year. Aggressive external competition and an infusion of SolidFire staff are pushing the company forward.