Tag: restore

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:

Migration Weekend: Success

rthomson Leave a comment

It was a long weekend of watching tape restores and restarting them as necessary but it’s finally over and everything appears to be mostly hunky dory!

I did discovery yet more small misconfigurations and strange behaviour along the way:

  1. OpenLDAP’s syncrepl using “refereshAndPersist” wasn’t working how I expected it to, no new changes were replicating to the slave LDAP server! I changed the directive to “refreshOnly” and set a 10 minute interval. I made several changes and monitored the slave LDAP server. Changes propagated in about 10 minutes, every time.
  2. Despite iSCSI’s maturity and the maturity of QLogic’s HBAs I still noticed strange, unexplained target drop outs. Two HBAs per server, two controllers in the IBM DS3300 and just one target out of four was dropping. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to properly reconnect the target on a live system so I rebooted. Later, I discovered you can “disable” and then “enable” the specific target in SANsurfer or iscli, which worked to bring back the dropped target on a live system. Multipath picked up the “new” path right away, as expected.
  3. Always remember to leave free physical extents in any LVM Volume Group in which you are taking snapshots of the Logical Volumes. It’s freakin’ obvious but I forgot and when I went to do snapshot backups, the snapshots were failing. Now I’m growing some LUNs on the DS3300 so that my VGs have room for snapshots.

All in all, a good weekend that was mostly filled with success.

Migration Weekend

rthomson Leave a comment

The big data migration is upon me!

This weekend we will be migrating about 3TB of data from aging 5 year old servers with internal DAS RAID over to the new infrastructure I’ve been building over the last two months. Part of my genius plan is to migrate the data using our backup & restore software. The genius I believe comes from the fact that doing the migration via tape restore will provide a long overdue full test of our capability to restore in the event of catastrophic storage failure. Data migration and restore testing, two birds with one stone.

Wish me luck!