Category: Networking

Posted on

IBM Bladecenter “Can not read power-on VPD for blade”

Spent two hours at the DC Friday night trying to install some new blades in our bladecenter. Every time I installed a new blade the power light kept flashing rapidly. I logged into the web management for the bladecenter and saw the event log entry “Can not read power-on VPD for blade”. Because the bladecenter would not read the hardware VPD from the blade it would not allow it to power on.

After speaking with IBM support we decided to update the firmware of the AMM (advanced management module) in the bladecenter. When I tried to update the firmware it gave me an error saying that it could not install the update. After 45 mins of trial and error with the IBM engineer (great support BTW, 1000 times better than dell!) we decided to reboot the AMM. (this had no affect on the running blades btw).

After a reboot everything worked fine! I was able to install the 6 new blades and update the AMM firmware to the latest release. It was strange because all the other functions of the AMM seemed to be working fine, the already installed blades were communicating with the AMM without issue. I would suggest that anyone who runs into this issue should try to reboot the AMM first, as it’s a fairly low impact thing to do and it would have saved me an hour if I had thought to do it from the start.

Posted on

Free Recursive DNS for your pc or network

Yesterday I stumbled on a website that provides free recursive DNS. It seems to work quite well and is nice an fast. They even offer common spelling mistake auto-correction and phishing prevention. The website states they make a profit by offering targeted search results to end users when they enter an unresolvable domain name. Neat idea. I wish domain squatters did this instead, it allows them to not just get some typo’s that they think of but ALL typos.

Free caching DNS servers are a great idea, it allows people who don’t have decent DNS servers provided by their ISP’s to have reliable DNS. Also, those who run their own caching nameservers can use them as forwarders to reduce the strain on the root servers.

Posted on

Blocking outbound SMTP

My ISP has adopted a policy of network filtering lately that gets on my nerves. They block all outbound SMTP from their broadband customers except to their mail exchangers. While I think this is a good policy to have as it blocks mail worms and spam they should at least ensure that their mail servers are not overloaded! Forcing me (the paying customer) to suffer because they can’t get it together enough to add some capacity to the mail infrastructure on their network is not a good idea when the local broadband market is so competative.

I mean, I realize that from time to time any large network is going to experience capacity issues, but the mail issue has been going on for months now. I’ve tried to tell their customer support people about it but I get the feeling that nothing’s going to be done about the issue.

In the meantime I’ve setup rinetd on my mail server to accept smtp connections on a non-standard port to avoid port 25 filtering all together.