From the category archives:

Hardware

10 Tips to Use Your Hardware and Software Vendor Support Effectively

by Ramesh Natarajan on September 29, 2008

[Tech Support by a Cat]Photo courtesy of wraithtdk

Companies purchase support for most of their enterprise hardwares (servers, switches, routers, firewalls etc.,) and softwares (databases, OS, applications, frameworks etc.,). They spend lot of cash on support mainly for two reasons: 1) To get help from vendors to fix critical production issues 2) To keep up-to-date with the latest version of the software and security patches released by the vendors. In this article, I’ve given 10 practical tips for DBAs, sysadmins and developers to use their hardware and software support effectively.
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36 Items To Capture For Practical Hardware Asset Tracking

by Ramesh Natarajan on August 18, 2008

Asset Tracking LogoIf you are managing more than one equipment in your organization, it is very important to document and track ALL information about the servers effectively. In this article, I have listed 36 attributes that needs to be tracked for your equipments, with an explanation on why it needs to be tracked. I have also provided a spreadsheet template with these fields that will give you a jumpstart.
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Step-by-Step Guide to Configure Hardware RAID on DELL servers with Screenshots

by Ramesh Natarajan on July 29, 2008

Dell ServerExpanding the capacity of a server by adding new disk drives is a typical activity for administrator. In this article, let us review how to add two new disk drives to the DELL server and create RAID 1 using “Dell PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller – PERC” configuration utility. This tool is also called as “PERC/CERC Bios Configuration Utility”.
 
If you are using the latest DELL Servers, please refer to the article that explains how to create RAID on PERC 6/i Integrated BIOS Configuration Utility.
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How-To Launch RAID management application on DELL Servers from RedHat Linux

by Ramesh Natarajan on June 22, 2008

Dell Server

 
 

PERC/CERC Configuration utility from DELL is used to manage the disks on the server and perform several disk related activities. for e.g. Create Logical Volumes with different RAID options, check for the consistency of the disks etc.

During the server startup process, there is an option to Launch the PERC/CERC configuration utility. However sometimes it may be required to view the disk information or perform certain disk related operation without having to reboot the server. In this article, I’ll explain how to launch PERC/CERC configuration utility directly from the RedHat Linux.

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How To Diagnose Memory (Hardware) Issues on DELL Servers

by Ramesh Natarajan on June 4, 2008

[Dell Server]Sometimes it may be necessary to find out whether there are any issues with the memory or other hardware components on a server. Typically it is recommended to perform this kind of test on a server before deploying for production usage. DELL has provided few tools to perform hardware diagnostics on DELL Servers. Let us review “Dell 32 Bit Diagnostics” tools in this post.
 
This Diagnostics tools can be used on DELL PowerEdge servers and PowerVault. Following items are covered in this post:

  1. Download Diagnostics utility from Dell support site.
  2. Create bootable CD
  3. Execute the memory test
  4. Graphics based diagnostics

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