Catch-up
All this week I’ve been working on a project that has kept me in the bowels of our data-center plugging away troubleshooting in a cubicle. Nothing is less fun than sitting in a gray monochrome cubicle with no view of a window troubleshooting technology you’ve never worked with.
Ugh.
But I can say that nothing beats a solid troubleshooting process. By logically working through a problem by first understanding what it is trying to do, you can identify and resolve any problem you are having.
That was awesome and rather vague.
By LonerVamp on 12.18.06 3:07 pm
Yeah, reading it now I sound awkward. The project drained me completely by day 3…but at the end of the three days we had a solid solution that incorporated a web-clustering appliance with redundant web servers, redundant NAS data storage devices and a redundant back-end. So it paid off. I just wish I could discuss the technology more specifically.
By Michael on 12.18.06 7:59 pm
Redundant NAS? What vendor were you using out of curiosity (if you can state it), and were you exposing it via CIFS or iSCSI (I’m assuming the latter)…
Just curious.
By Matt on 12.19.06 10:22 am
Unfortunately I’m unable to name the vendor.
You are correct, on the front end NAS we’re connected directly with iSCSI. To connect to the back-end NAS devices we use CIFS.
We were able to put ACL’s on the clustering appliance as well as the gateway firewall strictly controlling CIFS access.
Today I used Microsoft’s Security Configuration Wizard (SCW) to do most of the hardening work. Its great because you get the platform built to a production state first (but keeping it in a protected state) then run SCW and it analyzes the server and detects the services and configurations currently used. Pretty handy for system hardening, plus you can save the generated policy and then deploy it to all similar machines in the cluster.
By Michael on 12.19.06 11:15 am