https://www.scottharney.com/post/ Recent content in Posts on Scott Harney Hugo -- gohugo.io en-US 2019. All Rights Reserved. Thu, 19 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/parsing-netapp-autosupport-files-with-python/ Thu, 19 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/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. https://www.scottharney.com/wireguard-and-pi-hole/ Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/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. https://www.scottharney.com/digitalocean-and-nextcloud/ Tue, 28 May 2019 11:04:00 -0500 https://www.scottharney.com/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. https://www.scottharney.com/the-use-method-for-troubleshooting/ Mon, 13 Aug 2018 08:01:47 -0500 https://www.scottharney.com/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>— 🔎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. https://www.scottharney.com/netapp-transition-migration-with-powershell-helpers/ Sun, 06 Aug 2017 17:57:54 -0500 https://www.scottharney.com/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. https://www.scottharney.com/netapp-post-transition-snapshot-cleanup-with-powershell/ Wed, 19 Jul 2017 17:53:11 -0500 https://www.scottharney.com/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. https://www.scottharney.com/some-site-changes/ Tue, 02 May 2017 17:33:13 -0500 https://www.scottharney.com/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. https://www.scottharney.com/new-year-new-job/ Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/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. https://www.scottharney.com/automating-nutanix-prism-vms/ Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/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. https://www.scottharney.com/netapp-insight-2016-impressions/ Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/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. https://www.scottharney.com/using-ansible-to-bootstap-my-work-environment-part-5/ Fri, 08 Jul 2016 08:10:51 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/using-ansible-to-bootstap-my-work-environment-part-5/ What is the point of all of this effort? After all this is a very specific, personal work environment. This seems like an inordinate amount of time spent tweaking specific little items and where is the value in that? Is there a wider applicability to this effort? Learning In order to learn something new, such as an automation framework, you need to have some itch to scratch, a genuine purpose. Mine was twofold. https://www.scottharney.com/using-ansible-to-bootstap-my-work-environment-part-4/ Wed, 06 Jul 2016 08:29:24 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/using-ansible-to-bootstap-my-work-environment-part-4/ Overview Using an AWS EC2 instance as a utility host presents additional interesting wrinkles. With EC2, one can spin up and tear down instances quickly and dynamically. Because charging on AWS is usage based, I can either provision or start a previously provisioned instance as needed. When I decide to add new parts to my work environment I can use Ansible to quickly provision and test a replacement instance environment while my previous known-good configuration is still available to start and use. https://www.scottharney.com/using-ansible-to-bootstap-my-work-environment-part-3/ Tue, 05 Jul 2016 09:59:08 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/using-ansible-to-bootstap-my-work-environment-part-3/ In my previous post I dove into crouton specific role items. These were just little bits unique to a Chromebook chroot environment. The bulk of items I can automate with ansible are common to any linux install I might do. I’m focused on Ubuntu for desktop work but given the way ansible works, I can customize this to use with any distribution perhaps segregating an OS-distribution specific role down the road. https://www.scottharney.com/using-ansible-to-bootstap-my-work-environment-part-2/ Tue, 05 Jul 2016 09:35:19 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/using-ansible-to-bootstap-my-work-environment-part-2/ Besides my standard day-to-day laptop running Ubuntu, I also have a Chromebook I picked up a while back. I like the light weight and the long battery life for traveling around. ChromeOS along covers a lot of what I do daily, but I do like to have a few additional linux tools to get things done so I use crouton. With crouton there’s a few manual steps involved in preparing the Chromebook but they are well documented. https://www.scottharney.com/using-ansible-to-bootstap-my-work-environment_part_1/ Mon, 27 Jun 2016 16:57:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/using-ansible-to-bootstap-my-work-environment_part_1/ Lately, I’ve been on a journey to learn about all things cloud and “devops”. Like any long term professional, I like my desktop work environment just so. You do a lot of configuration along the way. To get a handle on that, the first thing I started doing was maintaining all my configuration files in a private git repo. This digital ocean article is my preferred method for doing that. This was really step zero in the journey. https://www.scottharney.com/translating-unix-shell-processing-to-powershell-equivalents/ Tue, 16 Feb 2016 08:54:07 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/translating-unix-shell-processing-to-powershell-equivalents/ I frequently find myself comparing data sets from Unix hosts and other systems. My go to for years are Linux shell commands. I’d ssh into a system, grab some data, and process with sed, awk, sort, uniq, perl etc. These days, however, I find myself working with customers who are more comfortable working with PowerShell. It became interesting to see how I might translate work from Unix shell equivalents which is how I tend to think when given a task and use PowerShell equivalents. https://www.scottharney.com/mardi-gras-2016-pics/ Mon, 15 Feb 2016 08:15:52 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/mardi-gras-2016-pics/ Mardi Gras 2016 Highlight pics https://www.scottharney.com/using-python-and-netmiko-to-automate-san-zoning/ Wed, 13 Jan 2016 08:57:52 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/using-python-and-netmiko-to-automate-san-zoning/ UPDATE github repo for this (H/T Scott Lowe) One of the customers I’m currently supporting is performing a migration of their NetApp storage from classic 7-mode to Clustered Data OnTap. It’s a fiber channel environment so lots of FC zoning changes are required. To minimize mistakes and ensure consistency, some form of automation is needed. The Cisco MDS fiber channel switches run a version of NX-OS but it’s relatively old and doesn’t include an accessible API-based interface. https://www.scottharney.com/link-why-i-hate-itil-so-much/ Thu, 01 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/link-why-i-hate-itil-so-much/ So much of this rings true. Why I Hate ITIL So Much on Ethereal Mind https://www.scottharney.com/gitlab_challenge/ Mon, 28 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/gitlab_challenge/ Intro In addition to using github a little bit, I've built my own private gitlab server. Part of my motivation is that some things I'm using this for don't belong on a public repo. Part of it is education. I already have an apache server running and wanted to integrate my gitlab access into this in a fluid fashion rather than running and exposing gitlab on some alternate port. https://www.scottharney.com/k10/ Sat, 29 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/k10/ In the past we’ve been out of town for 8/29. Not this year. The coverage and discussions have been impossible to avoid. The memories and emotions of those dark days have risen up. I really don’t have much else I want to say beyond what I was saying 10 years ago. My first blog post after the storm - Sept 11, 2005. Picture Album - Pictures of our home and neighborhood from that time. https://www.scottharney.com/link-all-flash-storage-stumbles-on-cost-per-gigabyte/ Wed, 15 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/link-all-flash-storage-stumbles-on-cost-per-gigabyte/ A recent post on the notion of the All-Flash Data Center running up against customer realities. This echoes a previous post of mine. Just as the cost flash is decreasing so is the cost of spinning media. Just as flash benefits from dedupe/compression capabilities, so does spinning media driving down the cost of ‘effective capacity’ further. Flash will of course gain against spinning media for active data but we still appear to be a long way off from an all solid state data center without low-cost, high-density magnetic media. https://www.scottharney.com/powershell-scripts-for-backup-of-cdot-nfs-exports/ Thu, 04 Jun 2015 09:07:31 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/powershell-scripts-for-backup-of-cdot-nfs-exports/ Intro I was working with a customer recently on their new clustered Data OnTap environment. They upgraded from 7-mode and were working on their Disaster Recovery solution. In a 7-mode world, copying SMB shares and NFS exports from a source FAS into a DR target FAS is really just a file copy. The customer environment is relatively small and they like to keep it simple. So doing a simple file compare of /etc/exports works for them. https://www.scottharney.com/link-the-mozilla-foundation-deprecating-http/ Mon, 18 May 2015 08:05:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/link-the-mozilla-foundation-deprecating-http/ A good thought piece on the Mozilla Foundation’s recent announcement. Part We’re Deprecating HTTP And It’s Going To Be Okay https://www.scottharney.com/document-as-you-go/ Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/document-as-you-go/ Intro. the documentation challenge One habit I strongly recommend to tech practitioners is to document as you go. The usual habit is to try and document everything after you’ve done a new task or completed a troubleshooting item. This rarely works. Usually you’re tired. You’ve forgotten steps or the order things have happened. This is especially true if you’re troubleshooting an issue. You don’t remember exactly what you changed or when, you just know it’s fixed now. https://www.scottharney.com/when-rendering-your-laptop-unbootable-is-a-learning-experience/ Wed, 11 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/when-rendering-your-laptop-unbootable-is-a-learning-experience/ Introduction. What happened? I was at a customer site assisting some performance testing of Linux hosts connected to NetApp via NFS. The customer was using sio_ntap which is a NetApp provided load generator and I was experimenting with the same on my laptop. I wasn’t paying close attention and instead of pointing the tool at a file I pointed it at /dev/sda2 which is /boot on my system. I did this dumb thing as root of course. https://www.scottharney.com/link-no-reboot-linux-kernel_4.0/ Fri, 06 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/link-no-reboot-linux-kernel_4.0/ At the Linux Plumbers Conference in October 2014, the two groups got together and started work on a way to patch Linux without rebooting that combines the best of both programs. Essentially, what they ended up doing was putting both kpatch and kGraft in the 4.0 Linux kernel. link https://www.scottharney.com/link-software-defined-networking-rethink/ Fri, 20 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/link-software-defined-networking-rethink/ In the current model of SDN, not much has really been tidied up or integrated. We still rely on all those things to some extent. After all, doing away with, say, VLAN would be like doing away with global brands like ketchup, and coke. Rather, network virtualization has been approached by emulating the old software stack, designed principally for LAN, based on tunnels that encapsulate the existing view of the world. https://www.scottharney.com/mardi-gras-pics-2015-weekend-2/ Thu, 19 Feb 2015 17:28:02 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/mardi-gras-pics-2015-weekend-2/ Mardi Gras 2015 - Weekend 2 https://www.scottharney.com/mardi-gras-pics-2015-weekend-1/ Tue, 10 Feb 2015 17:28:02 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/mardi-gras-pics-2015-weekend-1/ Mardi Gras 2015 - Weekend 1 https://www.scottharney.com/the-all-flash-array-to-buy-or-not-to-buy/ Mon, 02 Feb 2015 08:27:02 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/the-all-flash-array-to-buy-or-not-to-buy/ All flash storage arrays are all the rage. There are numerous relatively new entrants into the storage market seeking to upend the big player status quo. All of my customers are being approached and asking their own questions. They’re planning ahead and trying to decide if they should go all flash. “Can I afford it?” “Is spinning disk dead?” “Do they have all the features I want? “Will the vendor be here in three years? https://www.scottharney.com/what-i-do-for-a-living/ Wed, 21 Jan 2015 09:42:43 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/what-i-do-for-a-living/ “So what do you do?” So one of the most common questions I get from friends and family is “So what is it you do now?” Most of them know I changed jobs 6 months ago. That said, it was always rather hard to explain to non-technical friends what it is I actually did then. To some degree it’s easier to explain what I do now. My role is what is classically known as a “Sales Engineer” though at ASG our title is “Consulting Engineer” which is a reflection of our company direction. https://www.scottharney.com/what-programming-computer-games-was-like-in-the-80s/ Mon, 19 Jan 2015 09:01:06 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/what-programming-computer-games-was-like-in-the-80s/ Taken together, the operating system and BASIC gave you everything you needed to write and run your own little programs. But the computer contained no word processor, no bells and whistles, no array of applications waiting for you to play with them, no instant pleasurable pay-off for buying a new computer. When you turned on the Atom or the BBC Micro, the ROM chip booted up its two pieces of cargo and on your television screen appeared this: https://www.scottharney.com/link-six-features-you-absolutely-need-on-your-storage-in-2015/ Thu, 15 Jan 2015 10:55:19 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/link-six-features-you-absolutely-need-on-your-storage-in-2015/ It’s 2015, but you would think it was 1995 based on what we’re still using in our data centers for enterprise storage. We still have gobs and gobs of spinning disks, sucking power and boring us to death while they find our data. Convergence is largely unconverged—we still have separate Fibre Channel and IP data networks, and the only things that got converged were our bills of materials and the sides of our wallets. https://www.scottharney.com/link-a-non-programmers-introduction-to-git/ Wed, 14 Jan 2015 13:18:46 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/link-a-non-programmers-introduction-to-git/ This is all well and good, but how can I (as a non-programmer) use a tool like Git? Here are a couple examples: You can use a Git repository to store the documentation for an IT project or service. The repository’s commit history will reflect changes in the IT project or service over time. You can store configuration files in a Git repository. If a change to a configuration file produces adverse results, you can use the repository’s commit history to go back to a previous version of the file. https://www.scottharney.com/new-year-new-start-with-jekyll/ Wed, 14 Jan 2015 12:06:10 +0000 https://www.scottharney.com/new-year-new-start-with-jekyll/ So it’s a new year and time to make a new start on ye olde blog site. I last refreshed my design and tools around 2006. So why change now? Well I was influenced by Scott Lowe’s migration post. A lot of what he had to say resonated with me. Back in July I changed my job role from a hands-on, live-down-in-the-weeds technologist running a fairly large complex portion of a customer environment to a consultancy role advising a variety of customers.