Category: Sysadmin

HPE MSA2040 Password Recovery / Factory Reset

rthomson Leave a comment

I recently needed to reset the password on an HPE MSA2040 SAN to which I had physical access. It turns out this information was more difficult to find than I had presumed.

The often recommended action is to contact HPE who will send a engineer on-site to reset the MSA password/settings. Don’t hesitate to do that if you have an active support contract. However, here are the instructions for doing it yourself, without a call to support:

  1. Connect to the MSA CLI interface over the USB serial port using putty, minicom or your preferred serial terminal emulator (see HPE documentation).
  2. Hit enter to display to the MSA welcome banner and login prompt
  3. Proceed to login with username restoredefaults and the serial number of the MSA module as the password
  4. The controller will reboot to factory settings, albeit retaining the network (IP) configuration
  5. Once the controller has rebooted, you can login with HPE default username manage and password !manage

Credit to the commentator on these pages whom provided the key information about the “secret” username and password combo to trigger the reset:

Time Management with Trello

rthomson Leave a comment

I have been using Trello to manage my time, tasks and projects for several months now and it’s the most satisfied I’ve been with any particular tool to date. It’s simple. It’s easy. It’s generic enough to use for almost anything.

Throughout my time using Trello, I’ve developed a framework to implement the processes that work best for me. These processes and habits are influenced and informed by the work of Tom Limoncelli in his classic “Time Management for System Administrators” (go buy it now!). This board is use in combination with a traditional calendar for fixed date & time events.

Are you looking for a simple way to more effectively manage your time? Take a look at my Time Management Trello board template, create a copy for yourself and enjoy the good feels!

Well that was fast!

rthomson Leave a comment

Not even 24 hours after moving iSight Disabler over to GitHub, the repository has already been cloned twice and received its first pull request. It took me longer to get around to merging the request then that time between creating the repo and the pull request!

I realize that two clones and one pull request is paltry in the high paced world of GitHub and OSS development but I’m still a bit shocked by how quickly the community was able to start contributing once the project was on GitHub.

The iSight Disabler page on techslaves.org will remain up with the legacy download links but all new code/versions will only be available on GitHub. Got an idea to improve iSight Disabler? Clone, fix, pull request, merge and DONE!