Mindeasy Technology Know how

Archive for June, 2010

The MSA 2312 i is one of Hp’s iscsi storage appliances. This applianceis easy to setup and provides decent I/O’s for the price.  Currently I use this appliance for my corporate VMware system and it has not had any issues yet, running 20 or so moderately used VM’s.  The unit contains 2 controllers with a total of 4 iscsi ports that can be grouped together.  Sadly though my biggest con for this appliance is that the iscsi ports can not be teamed together to increase throughput.  They however can be grouped together to provide multipathing.  The mutipathing will be active/passive and can not be active/active.  The 2312i can be connected to up to 32 hosts and be directly connected to up to 4 more 2312i units, so the unit is expandable.  Overall this is a good entry to mid level storage appliance for light duty to moderate duty work.

Specifications

Performance- Each controller boosts an Athlon 2600+ processor, 300 MBps data Transfer rates and 1 GB memory.   

Raid Levels – The MSA 2312 i supports Raid 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 50

Drives- Sata and SAS

Ports- 4 x GB iscsi ports

Screen shots of the GUI

Why do you want to Disable SSL 2.0 on your web server.  Well the reason is all new SSL certificates now come as SSL 3.0 and the second reason SSL 2.0 is insecure.  It is susceptible to man in the middle attacks.  All Certificates  now only Use SSL 3.0, Now if your site still uses a certificate with SSL 2.0 get a new one.  Alsoif you have a system that scan your site like Macafee Hackersafe or Security Metrics, it will detect that you have SSL 2.0 and it will actually make you PCI in-compliant.  Below are the steps on how to disable SSL 2.0 on a Windows 2003 server with IIS 6.0 installed.

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedt32 or type regedit, and then click OK
2. In Registry Editor, locate the following registry key:HKey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders \SCHANNEL\Protocols\SSL 2.0\Server
3. On the Edit menu, click Add Value.
4. In the Data Type list, click DWORD
5. In the Value Name box, type Enabled, and then click OK
6. Click OK. Restart the computer

These Instructions work with both IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0

What is a SPF record? Well it is a DNS entry that is used to help combat SPAM and email spoofing. It does this by adding information to DNS about which servers are allowed to send email for that Domain.  A SPF record is a custom record call txt in windows DNS. There are many tools that can help you automatically create a SPF record. At the end of this article I will list a great one.  The way SPF combats SPAM and domain Spoofing is when an email is sent from XYZ domain the receiving server or mail gateway (if configured to do SPF checking) does a SPF check. Once it

Ever had a situation, where a machine was put in front off you and you where told this program doesn’t work?  Well You are in IT so you obviously have and if not you are still in school.  I had this happen to me when our CEO adobe acrobat was not working.  Well I thought I will just un-install the program and reinstall.  I soon found out Adobe would not uninstall and I could not install Acrobat until the old one was gone.  Now reinstalling his machine was out off the question so I googled and found this tool.  The Microsoft Window Installer Cleanup Utility.  It pretty much un-installs any MSI on your system.  Below is the link to where to get it and a nice description.  This tool has saved my life a few times.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301