Tales from the Datacenter » Miscellaneous

Editing Local Groups via the Command Line

Patrick — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:51:08 +0000

I use MDT to deploy our servers here at the office and I’m frequently forgetting build steps – namely adding a certain group to the local Administrators group on all the servers I build. I was looking for a way to script it and was pleasantly surprised to find out that it’s just a single command that can be run at the command line.

The command:

net localgroup Administrators /add "domain\domain group"

If you want to edit a group other than the local Administrators group, just change “Administrators” above to whatever the appropriate group may be.

Opinion: The Unspoken Truth About Managing Geeks

Patrick — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:58:35 +0000

I think that all users (and maybe even some IT professionals) should read this article. Maybe then, us geeks will have a little understanding. Jeff Ello at Computerworld writes:

Few people notice this, but for IT groups respect is the currency of the realm. IT pros do not squander this currency. Those whom they do not believe are worthy of their respect might instead be treated to professional courtesy, a friendly demeanor or the acceptance of authority. Gaining respect is not a matter of being the boss and has nothing to do with being likeable or sociable; whether you talk, eat or smell right; or any measure that isn’t directly related to the work. The amount of respect an IT pro pays someone is a measure of how tolerable that person is when it comes to getting things done, including the elegance and practicality of his solutions and suggestions. IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.

Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks

Best Practice: Cabling an EXP810 to a DS4700

Patrick — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:46:00 +0000

We’ve been expanding our storage capacity here at work in the recent weeks. As such, cabling all of these IBM DS4700s and their associated EXP810s (full of glorious fiber channel and SATA drives) became a task.

The question has always been how best to cable the fiber that keeps all this stuff working properly. You see, each DS4700 (the controlling enclosure) has two fiber controllers, each with two HBAs for connecting the EXP810 expansion enclosures. Well, we came across an IBM document that details exactly how they recommend cabling – and here it is. And here is the recommendation for a DS4700 with its maximum number (six) of expansion EXP810s (click for a larger view):

How Google Routes Around Outages

Patrick — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:51:22 +0000

No, that’s not my title. The folks over at Data Center Knowledge have an interview with Urs Holzle, Google’s Datacenter Operations Manager:

Making changes to Google’s search infrastructure is akin to “changing the tires on a car while you’re going at 60 down the freeway,” according Urs Holzle, who oversees the company’s massive data center operations. Google updates its software and systems on an ongoing basis, usually without incident. But not always. On Feb. 24 a bug in the software that manages the location of Google’s data triggered an outage in Gmail, the widely-used webmail component of Google.

Just a few days earlier, Google’s services remained online during a power outage at a third-party data center near Atlanta where Google hosts some of its many servers. Google doesn’t discuss operations of specific data centers. But Holzle, the company’s Senior Vice President of Operations and a Google Fellow, provided an overview of how Google has engineered its system to manage hardware failures and software bugs.