Dear #Qlikview, portal improvements

Posted on April 23, 2012 by mellerbeck

Dear Qlikview I am trying to love your AccessPoint portal. It has everything I need, categories, thumbnails, favorites…

The only thing it lacks? I can’t really use it like a real portal. What do I mean, well take for example my iGoogle page. I open that sucker up and stay in it for say months at a time.

If I open up the Qlikview Access point, it only keeps me signed in for around a half an hour. Are you trying to send me a message. Do you not want me to live and breathe the qlikview Access point (Because I want to, you just won’t let me)

I asked support about this, the response:

Apologies, but it turns out you can only adjust how long a QVW will remain open. Leaving the AccessPoint open to click on another QVW will not work because it requires a session cookie that times out and the timeout value is hard coded in for security. So all of those settings only apply to open QVWs.

Needless to say, I haven’t been able to get my users to adopt the portal because of this! Instead I am running on a old version of meta-dot portal software that doesn’t time out!

Donald(Dot)Farmer, Qlikview evangelist extraordinaire, any love for making this more user friendly. I understand that security is important, but not at the sacrifice of usability?

Or at least let me decide how secure I need to be….

Filed under: Qlikview | Leave a comment »

This server] Failed to open management RPC connection to proxy service. Port: ‘6162’. The RPC server is unavailable RPC function call failed. #VEEAM

Posted on April 19, 2012 by mellerbeck

This looks to be the sign of a dying server 🙂 The veeam backup proxy service did not start on initial system startup. When I started it manually though, it did start. I also have a PFA predicitve fail on a drive so once again I think the poor server is dying.

Filed under: veeam | 1 Comment »

Even more fun with the IBM 3690, Hemisphere Mode

Posted on April 18, 2012 by mellerbeck

So, have you heard of hemisphere mode?

Hemisphere Mode is an important performance optimization of the Xeon 6500 and 7500

processors. Hemisphere Mode is automatically enabled by the system if the memory

configuration allows it. This mode interleaves memory requests between the two memory

controllers within each processor, enabling reduced latency and increased throughput. It also

allows the processor to optimize its internal buffers to maximize memory throughput.

 

Hemisphere Mode is enabled only when the memory configuration behind each memory

controller on a processor is identical. Because the Xeon 7500 memory population rules

dictate that a minimum of two DIMMs are installed on each memory controller at a time (one on each of the attached memory buffers), DIMMs must be installed in quantities of four per

processor to enable Hemisphere Mode.

 Our consultant didn’t follow the four per processor rule….

But then it gets even more interesting.

So I have two quad port Ethernet adapters (Intel Ethernet Server Adapter I340-T4) of course I’m not lucky enough to have them install automagically with ESX so I need drivers.

After much, much googling I hit on this post http://blog.bradpeczka.com/2011/05/02/ibm-nics-in-vmware-esxi-4-04-1/ with a comment that they got it to work on their 3690 X5’s so at least I knew it was possible.

I was pretty sure that I wanted the 2.1.10.2 version as verified by http://partnerweb.vmware.com/comp_guide1/detail.php?device_cat=io&device_id=14747

I burned it, and then loaded it as an additional driver during the ESX install and that’s when it hung at “Status: 32% complete – Loading 34.storage-drivers”

Gah! So I tried all sorts of iterations, flipping ports, but luckily someone else had the answer on the forum.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/2005176

Even though it installed ESX just fine without the network drivers, once I included the network drivers the RAID drivers stopped working

Apparently this is a known issue with the new version of the firmware for the M1015 (which I of course flashed it to)…

http://www-947.ibm.com/support/entry/portal/docdisplay?lndocid=MIGR-5087330

So, download the updated megaraid driver, burn it to disk, http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/dt_esx4x_lsi_megaraid_529/ZHcqYnR0amhiZGhwZA==#version_history

And now I can install ESX…. That was easy

Filed under: 3690 X5, Applied IT, IBM | Leave a comment »

I was wondering if I could access shared storage from a stand alone host for esx

Posted on April 11, 2012 by mellerbeck

I was pretty sure it was OK, but then this post lays it out very nicely.

http://blog.cowger.us/2011/04/22/shared-vmfs-volumes-on-non-clustered-hosts/

Filed under: vmware | Leave a comment »

More fun with the IBM 3690 X5, Bad status has been detected on 2 physical drives

Posted on April 4, 2012 by mellerbeck

So…. normally you get a new IBM server. You download the update express CD (Except now you have to download the IBM ToolsCenter Bootable Media Creator) update everything in the system then pop in the ServerGuide CD http://www-947.ibm.com/support/entry/portal/docdisplay?lndocid=SERV-GUIDE and then configure the RAID Adapter.

But then I got this:

Bad Status has been detected on 2 physical drives. What is going on here? Did we get to bad drives shipped to us? That doesn’t seem likely?

So I try all sorts of things, after the whole mezzanine issue (LINK) I’m starting to suspect all of the hardware. But everything seems to check out OK.

Then I remembered vaguely reading something about the RAID and UEFI. And there it was page 362 of the 580 page manual

Create a drive RAID array before installation. The ServeRAID management interface is
accessible via UEFI settings, by selecting System Settings  Adapters and UEFI
Drivers.

You open up this abomination from the UEFI screen

 

Then it brings up a screen where you can configure your JBOD disks as unconfirmed good. At that point you can use serverguide to set up the RAID…. very annoying.

 

Filed under: 3690 X5, IBM | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

The BIOS reports that NUMA node 1 has no memory. The problem is either caused by a bad BIOS or a very unbalanced distribution of memory modules.

Posted on April 4, 2012 by mellerbeck

I was thinking this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60og9gwKh1o when I got this error 🙂

But it turns out,

With the IBM 3690 X5, if you are installing VMWare with two processors you need a memory mezzanine. Half the memory will be installed on the board for processor 1, and the other half will be installed on the mezzanine for processor two….

Important VMware ESX considerations: When installing and running VMware ESX on
this server, the operating system might fail to install or boot with the following error
message when the server memory configuration is not NUMA-compliant:
“NUMA node 1 has no memory”
There are only three possible configurations to support VMware:
 One processor is installed and no mezzanine board is installed.
 Two processors are installed and matching memory is installed on both the system
board and the mezzanine board.
 Two processors are installed, no internal memory is installed, and the memory installed
in an attached MAX5 memory expansion is configured as non-pooled memory.

Filed under: Applied IT, vmware | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

DataGridViewComboBoxColumn Drop Down Menu Appears All Black

Posted on April 4, 2012 by mellerbeck

This annoying bug was haunting me for quite a while. Luckily Nick Olsen figured it out

http://nickstips.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/c-datagridviewcomboboxcolumn-drop-down-menu-appears-all-black/

Code to fix

01 private void dataGridViewGLEntries_EditingControlShowing(object sender, DataGridViewEditingControlShowingEventArgs e)
02 {
03     ComboBox cmbBx = e.Control as ComboBox;
04
05     if (cmbBx != null)
06     {
07         cmbBx.SelectedIndexChanged -= ComboBoxCell_SelectedIndexChanged;
08         cmbBx.SelectedIndexChanged += ComboBoxCell_SelectedIndexChanged;
09
10         // Fix the black background on the drop down menu
11         e.CellStyle.BackColor = this.dataGridViewGLEntries.DefaultCellStyle.BackColor;
12     }
13 }

Filed under: Applied IT | Leave a comment »

Next Page »