Unix tail (like) utility for Windows

Bare Metal Software’s Bare Tail

Bare Tail is a handy little free utility that allows you to monitor log files on Windows real-time. Basically a GUI of the Unix command tail -f.

Allows you to tail monitor multiple files. Pretty neat check it out here http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baretail/index.php

The Windows 2003 Resource kit contains a command line tail utility that is also pretty handy.

Failover to Standby Datamover

Last night a tech from EMC was here to update the Control Station and DART code on our Celerra to enable file system deduplication (more about this later).

As part of this process we had to failover to our standby datamover. Thought these commands might be useful later so here they are.

server_2 – Primary datamover
server_3 – Standby datamover

Fail over to standby mover

# server_standby server_2 -a mover

Faults server_x and renames it to server_2.faulted.server_3
Renames server_3 to server_2
server_3 is now online as server_2

During the time it took to failover I dropped 3 pings to the datamover.

Fall back to primary mover

# server_standby server_2.faulted.server_3 -r mover

Renames standby server to server_3
Renames server_2.faulted.server_3 to server_2
server_2 is now back online as the primary mover.

Again I dropped 3 pings while the datamovers switched.

Here are a couple other useful Celerra commands.

Listing your datamovers and their status from the command line:

# /nas/bin/nas_server -l
id type acl slot groupID state name
1 1 0 2 0 server_2
2 4 0 3 0 server_3

You can get this info from the GUI but this is quick if you are logged into the Control Station CLI.

View the nas version running on your datamovers:

# server_version ALL
server_2 : Product: EMC Celerra File Server Version: T5.6.46.410
server_3 : Product: EMC Celerra File Server Version: T5.6.46.410

Basic stuff but it might be useful to have on hand later.

VMware Cookbook

I just picked this up today – VMware Cookbook – A Real-World Guide to Effective VMware Use

Most of the book was written while vSphere was still in beta so the book covers ESX/ESXi 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5.

I have only thumbed through it so far but it looks like there is a lot of good information. There are some pretty good tables with the configuration differences between 3.5 and 4 in Chapter 1. The command line reference in Chapter 5 should be useful to both versions, as well as the Security stuff in Chapter 6.

Looking forward to reading the book cover to cover.