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System Back After Blade Enclosure Update

I updated my HPE C7000 blade enclosures Virtual control modules to VC-Enet 10/24. I then updated the firmware to 4.85 so that it wouldn’t rely on flash in the browsers which as of this year is blocked for security reasons in browsers. That all went pretty well. I was of course unable to trick the new modules into taking the old configuration since the hardware is pretty different but a guy has to try, but gave it just one try due to the known futility.

Once I got old modules out the new modules in and needed to start the new network configurations I discovered some of the fiber sfp’s say unsupported in virtual connect manager. This was a mixture of 10gb sfp’s and 1gb rj45 adapter sfp’s for things like my CCTV cameras. Well got that sorted after I went to BJ’s restaurant got some food a nice cold beer out of the garage fridge and nourished myself plus watched whatever was on the TV when I turned it on. Turns out the RJ45 1GB sfp’s needed to be in a select spot which are one of the four right ports as you face the modules. The 10gb modules were a different story as the sfp’s with part number 455891-001 no longer worked so I had to swap a lot of things around to get sfp’s with the part numbers 455885-001 in the module ports plus at the other end in the MikroTik switches. I’m sure this is all in the quick specs for the virtual control modules and I’ll order some more for backups and other configurations later.

After tracing wires making sure they were going to the appropriate switches and ports I decided to log into the MikroTik switches and name them appropriately since they show the switch name if its a managed switch in the virtual connect port information and that makes it so easy to verify I’m working with the correct network without peeking at the switch or ports or getting off my butt.

The goal in IT is always engineer or design things for monitoring or manipulating for butt sitting and access from anywhere in the world if possible. Put in that work on the front end then only serious hardware upgrades like today do you need to get down and dirty! Back your S#$% up too!!

Creating the networks again and making sure the server profiles had the appropriate networks assigned to the various ports went rather smoothly.

The bl460c gen7 servers came up smoothly one with w2019 Data Center which has the Spacial Audio SAM Broadcasting software I use to control the music and the Centos8 server which has the ShoutCast and IceCast relays I send the music out on to the world. My only issue now doesn’t concern Snakeice’s House of Beats at this time and that’s the bl460c gen8 servers going full power overload at boot up causing issues and I’ll address that on my main personal blog @ https://dhoytt.com/mainblog/ once I get that taken care of! Plus I still have some serious wire management I need to do later down the line and ip.address groupings.

For now enjoy the fruits of my labor by listening to some mixed genre music from the data center in my upstairs bedroom I call my personal cloud because I don’t want my data on somebody else computers\clouds if I don’t have to!

Updating the Blade Chassis Environment Systems Going Down

Since I need to try and restore my configuration on my new Virtual Connect modules in my HPE C7000 Blade Chassis I need to power down and apply the configurations. Hopefully the backed up configuration from my VC-Enet 10/10 modules takes to the new modules VC-Enet 10/24 modules. Should the configuration not do what I like I may end up rebuilding my entire networking environment on the blade chassis end. This may affect drivers in the various OS’s on my blade servers as well, we shall see how long this process will be!

I did this backup so I would not have to workaround viewing the Virtual Connect environment in web browsers that no longer support flash. I could have done workarounds to having standalone flash stations in my environment or did all cli but decided I didn’t want to take away my flexibility to administer the environment from different systems. Better to make the changes now than later!

Back Up and Streaming After Relay System OS Updates Gone Astray

Well I’m back up and running with my Centos 8 relay server after some OS updates. Seems that during the updates for Linux Centos 8 included a new kernel for my system as well that didn’t support my C7000 Bl460c 10gb Emulex card. This was also an issue during my initial Centos 8 install and almost made me stay at Centos 7. I was able to get the “be2net” driver from “El Repo” Linux repository and it worked before.

I can see everything with “lspci” but for some reason now the new Centos 8 kernel doesn’t recognize this driver even though I loaded the kernel with “modprobe” several times. I created a file in /etc/modules-load.d/ with the module then created a file in “/etc/sysconfig/modules/” saw that the module was loaded with lsmod and just couldn’t get the network to see it. I uninstalled and re-installed from the El Repo repository “kmod-be2net” still no luck.

I the suddenly started not being able to use my “ilo” or my kvm\keyboard which started printing out strange signals every time I typed. After correcting those issues I could get back to why the network couldn’t see my 10gb Emulex network cards on my Flex10 interface but could see my 10gb Broacom 10gb interfaces coming from my Procurve switch in my C7000 chassis.

Tried a few more things then decided to switch my primary network over to my Procurve. I had to go through my Virtual Connect Manager to make sure I wasn’t going to disconnect any of my other systems and remind myself what my setup was. I switched my main network over to one of my Procurve switches.

I then got my ShoutCast relay up and then IceCast relay and then discovered neither could make it out to the rest of the world due to the routing table on my Centos 8 system getting borked up due to all of the changes I made. I started correcting the routing issues on the systems CLI and then just made sure my network files were correct and rebooted and voila my music streams are going out to the world again.

This system also hosts my Zoneminder CCTV camera systems and that network didn’t have a problem with my cameras on it but I route that to my user interface on the network that was having issues so that was an issue. I also have an instance of Plex on this system and its okay since I have other virtual servers with Plex Server but still it was a nuisance!

Anyway I’ll probably build one of my other bl460’s gen 7 systems back up with Centos 7 and put everything back on that system. Read about the road map of Centos 8 while looking through forums and earlier this week at Tweets and I don’t like how it looks. Centos 7 will be updated until 2024 so that’s good for me. I can’t waste time with OS updates that depreciates or doesn’t take into account widely used hardware with everything else I’m trying to accomplish to get my systems to certain state. This keeps up they may push me to the Debian side of Linux but they are using those “Snaps” way too much on that side of the Linux universe for things like databases!

Anyhow I’m up and operating with things Frankensteined for now music is flowing cameras are recording an movies and TV shows are streaming in the house as well.