Networknet.nl

When I verify my time difference between my local system and the time.windows.com NTP server I see I have 11 seconds difference.

Execute the following commands to check your local time service.

• Open a command prompt
• Type w32tm /stripchart /computer:time.windows.com /samples:5 /dataonly

I trust Microsoft that they are well maintaining their time infrastructure, but still I performed two additional checks to nist.gov servers.

• w32tm /stripchart /computer:time.nist.gov /samples:5 /dataonly
• w32tm /stripchart /computer:time-b.nist.gov /samples:5 /dataonly

Now I am manually configuring the Windows Time Service to synchronize my local time with the NTP peer at Microsoft.

• w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:time.windows.com /syncfromflags:manual /reliable:yes /update

Three new events are generated in Windows Vista

The time service is now synchronizing the system time with the time source time.windows.com (ntp.m|0×0|0.0.0.0:123->207.46.232.182:123).

The system time has changed to 3/7/2008 9:51:02 PM from 3/7/2008 9:51:13 PM. (My 11s ;-))

The system time has changed to 3/7/2008 9:51:02 PM from 3/7/2008 9:51:02 PM.

Final stripchart check and yes offset is 00.xxxx. Please consider these steps on your Active Directory PDC domain controller and their time source for your domain. For more information go to this article.

At some point the VMWare Server  host run out of diskspace on which the virtual guest machines were stored. Windows started to complain about low disk space and only 32KB was left. I tried to open VMWare Server console and I got the error message below "511 vmware-serverd service is not running." All virtual machines were running except the one which consumed the remaining diskspace of the physical SAS drives.

To resolve this issue I shutdown one of the virtual machines with a RDP session and moved the directory to another VMWare Server host; next step I did I tried to bring other virtual machines down by a RDP session and at some point I was left with two other virtual machines which both were not accessible by RDP nor by SSH for the linux one.

I opened Task Manager and located the remaining processes for the virtual machines.

vmware-vmx.exe is individual process for each virtual machine. Two were left and I stopped both vmware-vmx.exe processes. Open Services.msc console and restart the "VMware Registration Service" service.

After the service was restarted the initial process of starting the virtual machines started and all virtual machines were up and running. This is how I resolved the problem with VMWare Server, but it brings me back to the root cause of why this happened and one of the import things is to really think how you are going to seize your virtual machines and their disk space. I am going to implement thresholds and notifications with CactiEZ appliance soon and hopefully something which can help you also.

At some point my lab Openfiler was assigned static ip address and the iSCSI target stopped to function; also it was not reachable by the web interface at tcp port id 446 anymore. Several reboots did not help to solve the problem.

What happened? The network interface configuration was changed. One of the eth config files was changed from DHCP to a static ip address.

vi /etc/sysconfig/network

[root@net-nas-01 sysconfig]# cat network
NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=net-nas-01.networknet.nl
GATEWAY=192.168.100.254

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

[root@net-nas-01 network-scripts]# cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE=eth0
IPADDR=192.168.100.12
BOOTPROTO=static
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.100.0
GATEWAY=192.168.100.254
BROADCAST=192.168.100.255
ONBOOT=yes

Openfiler service failed if you checked the services (# service –status-all). The problem is Openfiler service checks the FQDN in the hosts file located in the etc directory.

[root@net-nas-01 ~]# service openfiler –full-restart
Stopping openfiler:                                        [FAILED]
Starting openfiler:                                        [FAILED]
[root@net-nas-01 ~]# service openfiler -configtest
Usage: openfiler {start|stop|restart|condrestart|reload|status|fullstatus|graceful|help|configtest}
[root@net-nas-01 ~]# service openfiler configtest
httpd: Could not determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName
Syntax OK
[root@net-nas-01 ~]# cd /etc
[root@net-nas-01 etc]# cat hosts
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1               localhost.localdomain localhost

Go and modify the hosts file. To modify the hosts file run this command –> vi /etc/hosts and make sure the FQDN names for 127.0.0.1 and the static ip address are set correct.

[root@net-nas-01 etc]# service openfiler –full-restart
Stopping openfiler:                                        [FAILED]
Starting openfiler:                                        [  OK  ]
[root@net-nas-01 etc]# cat hosts
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1                 net-nas-01.networknet.nl
192.168.100.12            net-nas-01.networknet.nl
[root@net-nas-01 etc]#

For more information go to Openfiler website.