NCSU OIT Integration Services

Boo hoo.

I was hoping that we could join a Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC) to an AD domain using the existing credentials and the web interface.  Alas!  It looks like we'll need to reboot the hosts in order to configure the DRACs during POST.

Folks,

 integrate.oit went off the air for a bit when it got a kernel update.  Just so I'm not the only one who knows the details, here's what I did to bring it back.  I'll print a hardcopy and stick it to my door, and we'll call it DRP. :-)

The integrate site it hosted on a virtual machine, named "drupal" running on wpdev.unity.ad.ncsu.edu .  Yes, the 'dev' means test box that isn't monitored.

You gain access to it with  PuTTY or ssh (regular Unity credentials).  

It's not the most popular method of navigating around in ACSAD, but there is a DFS root at

\\acsad.ncsu.edu\dfs

Most folks go in through CFS directly, but the DFS root has been there all along, nonetheless.

I've made a link here, "Unity" which will link back to \\unity.ad.ncsu.edu\dfs .  The plan is that whatever AD you usually log in to, you should be able to get to everything with only a single drive letter mapped.  So far, it's worked for Jamie and I, but not Wade.  Please post your own experiences! 

So as suspected, the issue with folks getting spurious pages about "unix-y" hosts was a mistake of different cultures.

Pager copies cccadm@help.ncsu.edu to get a Remedy call cut for any pages sent for the cccadm on-call group.  The *page* is sent through arch wireless or some other alpha paging system, the e-mail is just a cc so the incident will get a tracking number for later reporting/management.

Remedy is configured to copy the oit-iso-shs@lists.ncsu.edu mailing list.  This is where the unwanted pages at 3am are coming from.

Debbie and I spent some time this afternoon trying to quantify what was broken between ACSAD and UNITY.AD.

What we tested was creating a domain local group, and then adding members to that group from the other domain.  In all cases, we could browse and add from either domain without difficulties, but when we tried to view the members of the group, we got a "the other domain may be down" error after a long delay.

Hi gang,

 Joe and Will seem to have access controls assigned to groups rather then individual people in QIP.  Yay, go team, and woot!

For our monday meeting, I'd like to ask each of you to make a printout of all the VLANS that you have rights to in QIP, and mark up which ones you think the whole group needs, if they are to be responsible even in part for the job you're doing now.  I'd like to compile a map of VLANS, past and present.

We've extended the Unity.ad schema to support the older DRAC4 series out of band management cards, and will shortly do the same for ILO cards. Info about how they're used can be found in an earlier blog post.

The article that describes how to setup a DRAC5 card so that it doesn't need an AD schema extension can be found

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps3q07-20070343-Babu-OE.pdf

We do have older DRACS, so the info about the schema extensions for earlier DRACS can be found

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps4q04-20040123-McGary.pdf

So, for what it's worth, the blackberry I've been assigned has unlimited (SMS) text and 600 minutes of talk time a month.

According to the web page at

https://text.vzw.com/customer_site/secure/jsp/overview.jsp

To create a text message, one just e-mails to

mobile_number@vtext.com

Text length is limited to 140 characters. 

 So it turns out that all of the "out of the box" features that nagios provides are available to us on the http://nagios.unity.ncsu.edu site.  It offers you a link to the Sysnews NCSU specific pages, but there's also a link to the raw Nagios Status Page.

 In the left hand pane, you can select a "Service Detail" view that expands all the current service status information for a host group.