Storage Spaces Direct - storage

Some background:
I'm trying to set up Azure Pack in a test environment, and are currently woriking on setting up the servers who's going to host it all.
To do this i have two virtual Windows Server 2016 TP4 servers hostet on a ESXI host, and so i need to set up Storage Spaces Direct.
(iSCSI target and Storage Spaces (WS 2012), have been ruled out since the first is a nightmare to set up and the internet told me the second one comes with a low R/W speed).
I've been following this guide: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt126109.aspx
Problem:
When i run this cmdlet: Enable-ClusterStorageSpacesDirect
, I get this warning: No elegible DAS disk found.
Both servers have 3 disk each. They are initialized and 100% unallocated, and I have tried with them beeing both offline and online.
If I try running this cmdlet: (Get-Cluster).DasModeEnabled=1
I get the following error: The property 'DasModeEnabled' cannot be found on this object. Verify that the property exists and can be set.
Any and all help is greatly appriciated!

Storage Spaces Direct doesn't support FC & RAID-controlled LUNs.
The key is to force S2D to accept RAID BusType:
(Get-Cluster).S2DBusTypes=256
Here's a good article about it https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/resolving-enable-clusters2d-bus-type-support-issue-on-some-storage-controllers.
Another option is to reflash the controller's firmware to IT mode.
There's also other solutions, like that Starwind, which I suggest you to test.

Related

How to make container installation behave like host machine installation

I'm working with the following:
Docker for Windows v20.10.11
Docker running in Windows container mode
mcr.microsoft.com/windows:1903 base image
Proprietary application installed on top of this base image
Each year we create a Docker image with the latest version of our company's software. However this year's version behaves differently. Host machine installation runs fine. Containerized installation fails to run in certain situations. I can start the application as a simple EXE, for example using the Docker run command. The app will start and show up in "tasklist". However I can't start the app via the COM API, which is a critical requirement. The problem appears to be COM related. Normally we can create COM objects for our software just like for any other application. For example, IE returns a COM object just fine:
Creating these objects for our application works outside containers. However inside the container, our latest installation gives this error:
Access permissions appear to be ok. I tried a couple tests to prove this. First I can install other software like MS Word into a container and create COM objects for that:
Second I tried retrieving + modifying the application's DACL in PowerShell.
Changing access masks or trustees can cause an Access Denied error:
This also appears to confirm the access permissions were Ok by default.
Next I made sure COM is aware of the application. This appears to be fine. I get the same result on host machine and container when running this PS script:
gci HKLM:\Software\Classes -ea 0| ? {$.PSChildName -match '^\w+.\w+$' -and
(gp "$($.PSPath)\CLSID" -ea 0)} | ft PSChildName
The application shows up just like any other. The details show up fine when querying by AppID. LocalServer32 points to the correct EXE:
Some other things I tried:
Querying registry keys. There are 7 keys created when installing our software. These appear identical on host machine install and container install.
Even though permissions appear fine, I still tried logging into the container as alternate users. For example "nt authority\system" is another virtual admin user. I also changed the password of the "builtin\administrator" user to enable logging in with that one. Lastly tried creating new users entirely and adding them to the Administrators user group. All these attempts had the same errors as "builtin\containeradministrator" (default user).
A minor check was ensuring CMD.exe / Powershell is running as x64:
Re-registering the DLLs associated with the installation using regsvr32.
Starting from different base images. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/manage-containers/container-base-images. The full Win Server base image behaves exactly the same way regarding errors. The smaller Win Server Core base image is even more problematic, as I can't even start the app's EXE manually using that base. Lastly I tried other tags of the full Windows base image such as 20H2 and 2004. Same result from those. Multiarch or x64 makes no difference.
Included the "Ogawa hack" which was historically needed to make MS Office apps function correctly with COM: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1680214/7991646. It could be necessary for other COM apps too, but didn't help with my specific installation.
Is there anything else I can do to diagnose or solve this COM issue?
There are several things to consider:
The Considerations for server-side Automation of Office article states the following:
Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support, Automation of Microsoft Office applications from any unattended, non-interactive client application or component (including ASP, ASP.NET, DCOM, and NT Services), because Office may exhibit unstable behavior and/or deadlock when Office is run in this environment.
If you are building a solution that runs in a server-side context, you should try to use components that have been made safe for unattended execution. Or, you should try to find alternatives that allow at least part of the code to run client-side. If you use an Office application from a server-side solution, the application will lack many of the necessary capabilities to run successfully. Additionally, you will be taking risks with the stability of your overall solution.
The When CoCreateInstance returns 0x80080005 (CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE) page describes possible reasons.
If many COM+ applications run under different user accounts that are specified in the This User property, the computer cannot allocate memory to create a new desktop heap for the new user. Therefore, the process cannot start. See Error when you start many COM+ applications: Error code 80080005 -- server execution failed for more information.
Finally, you may find a similar thread here helpful, see Server execution failed (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80080005 (CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE)).

Enable k8s experimental features in Docker Desktop

does anyone know if this is possible?
All I can find in docs is reference to enabling docker experimental features, but not the kubernetes experimental features.
I tried this, but still get error.
k alpha debug -it exchange-pricing-865d579659-s8x6d --image=busybox --target=exchange-pricing-865d579659-s8x6d
error: ephemeral containers are disabled for this cluster (error from server: "the server could not find the requested resource").
Thanks
I had the same intent (as have others in this feature request). After several hours of trial and error, I finally found out a way to do so.
Steps:
Depending on which file you're trying to edit, you may need to fully shut down Docker Desktop, and restart WSL. (right-click tray-icon and press "Quit Docker Desktop", then run wsl --shutdown, then run wsl)
Open the [...]/kubeadm/manifests folder, in the Docker filesystem.
On Windows, navigate Windows Explorer to:
For Docker Desktop 4.2.0: \\wsl$\docker-desktop-data\version-pack-data\community\kubeadm\manifests
For Docker Desktop 4.11.0: \\wsl$\docker-desktop-data\data\kubeadm\manifests
Open the kube-controller-manager.yaml, kube-apiserver.yaml, and kube-scheduler.yaml files, adding the line below:
spec:
containers:
- command:
[...]
- --feature-gates=EphemeralContainers=true <-- add this line
Start Docker Desktop again.
It looks so easy when its already figured out, huh? Well trust me, it was a pain to find out.
Some of the slowdowns I hit:
It took me quite a while to even find those manifest files. (eventually found it using grepWin, searching through the whole \\wsl$\docker-desktop-data folder for any matches of a line I grabbed from the kube-apiserver-docker-desktop pod's config, which I viewed using Lens)
Once I found it, I got confused by this documentation. When I read FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.22 [alpha], I thought that meant you needed version 1.22 or higher of Kubernetes for the feature to be available. This caused a huge wild goose chase where I tried to change the version of Kubernetes that was being launched in Docker Desktop, which Docker Desktop didn't seem to like. (in retrospect, the issue may have just been the minor one in point 3 below...)
When I first made changes to the manifest files, I was using Notepad++. And despite my liking Notepad++, it's apparently not quite as smart as vscode in the following regard: it does not automatically detect the indentation type for yaml files. Thus, when I pressed tab to create an indent, so I could add the new flag to the argument list, it added it as a tab character rather than spaces. This caused Kubernetes to fail reading of the file. That might not be so bad if Kubernetes gave a sane error message for that, but instead it merely gave the message unexpected EOF. And I didn't even see that error message at first because it was not being propagated to the kube-controller-manager-docker-desktop pod (which was the only relevant one that wasn't immediately erroring/closing). Anyway, I didn't realize this was the problem at the time, so...
I decided to try bypassing the manifest-files and applying my modification to the etcd data-store directly. In retrospect, this was not a good idea, because the etcd data-store is pretty complex, the tooling is substandard, and the documentation is substandard. I spent a ton of time just trying to figure out how to send commands to read and write data to it (eventually managed to do so by calling etcdctl within the etcd-docker-desktop pod). I spent further time still writing up a NodeJS script capable of reading all the data as JSON, storing it in a dump file, and being able to write changes to entries back despite there being 3+ levels of quoting involved (I eventually was able to use stdin to pass the value rather than as part of the command string, to avoid quotation-mark-inception). After all the work on etcd reading/writing above, I found it didn't work anyway because Kubernetes invariably "breaks" if anyone else writes to its etcd data-store. (even if you write the exact same value that had been there before -- as verified by comparing the dumps before and after)
After all of the above, I decided to have one last go with just adding the flags to mentioned manifest files. Was still getting the startup failure/error, but at the very end, I decided I wanted to see exactly what about my changes was causing Kubernetes to reject them. So I tried commenting out my added line; the error remained. I thought maybe it was a checksum-based rejection then. But then I thought, maybe the YAML parser that Kubernetes is using is just outdated and is finicky about what comments it is able to recognize. So I tried moving the comment around to different places, and was puzzled when the manifest was being accepted just by moving the comment to the root level. I moved it back to various locations, with it working and not working, until I thought to try making the line "half-indented" since it's "in-between" the working and non-working versions. That's when I noticed the line had a tab as its indent. And then it hit me; are the other lines also using tabs? I checked, and nope, they were using spaces. And that's when I realized I had wasted the last few hours on something I coulda just fixed with a simple indent change.
The moral of the story for some is that YAML is a bad configuration format, because it makes it easy to make trivial errors like this. But I actually place the blame more on whatever parser Kubernetes is using for the YAML files; it is unacceptable that a YAML parser would encounter an indentation mismatch and give a message so generic as unexpected EOF. I don't know what the identity of that YAML parser is, but I'm tired enough of the subject that I'm not even going to look into it right now. If one of you finds it, please make an issue report for it -- perhaps including this story as a real-world example of the pain that ambiguous error messages can cause.
Since Ephemeral Containers is still an alpha feature, it is disabled by default.
As you can read here, for this to work, it requires the EphemeralContainers feature gate to be enabled, and Kubernetes client and server version v1.16 or later.
As to the 2nd requirement I assume both your Kuberntes server and client versions are v1.16 or later but it looks like, for the time being, the 1st requirement cannot be met on Docker Desktop. According to this issue, it currently doesn't support enabling Feature Gates.
However you may still try to ssh to your master node and edit the following files:
/etc/kubernetes/manifests/kube-apiserver.yaml
/etc/kubernetes/manifests/kube-scheduler.yaml
by adding inside the command section:
--feature-gates=EphemeralContainers=true
Then you need to delete those pods so they are recreated with new settings applied. You'll find them by running:
kubectl get pods -n kube-system

How do I make a simple public read-only WebDAV server with SabreDAV?

I recently began looking into WebDAV, as I found it to be an option for letting me play a Blu-ray folder remotely - i.e. without requiring the viewer to download the whole 24gb ISO first.
Add a WebDAV source in Kodi v18 to a Blu-ray folder - and it actually plays! Very awesome.
The server can also be mounted on Windows with
net use m: http://example.com/webdavfolder/
or in Linux with
sudo mount -t davfs http://example.com/webdavfolder/ /mnt/mywebdav
-and should then (in theory) play with any software media players that supports Blu-ray Disc Java (BD-J), such as PowerDVD and VLC.
vlc bluray:///mnt/mywebdav --bluray-menu
PowerDVD.exe AUTOPLAY BD m:
(Unless of course time-out values has been set too low, which seems to be the case for VLC at the moment).
Anyway, all this is great, except I can't figure out how to make my WebDAV server read-only. Currently anyone can delete files as they wish, and that's of course not optimal.
So far I've only experimented with SabreDAV, because afaik that's the only option I have if I want to keep using my existing webhost. Trying with very minimal setups, because I've read that minimal setups should default to a read-only solution. It just doesn't seem to happen.
I initially used the setup from http://sabre.io/dav/gettingstarted/ and tried removing some lines. Also tried calling chmod 0444 MainFolder -R on the webserver. And I can see that everything does get a read-only attribute. But it changes nothing. It's still possible to delete whatever I want. :-(
What am I missing?
Maybe I'm using the wrong technology for what I want to do? Is there some other/better way of offering a Blu-ray folder for remote viewing? (One that includes the whole experience - i.e. full Java menus etc).
I should probably mention that all of this is of course perfectly legal. It is my own Blu-ray project - not copyright material.
Also: Difficult to decide if this belongs on StackOverflow or SuperUser. I ended up posting it on StackOverflow because SabreDAV is about coding, and because there's no sabredav tag on SuperUser.
You have two options:
Create your own file/directory classes for sabre/dav that simply throw an error when trying to delete. You can basically start with a copy of Sabre\DAV\FS\Directory and Sabre\DAV\FS\File and change the methods that do writing.
Since you're considering just using linux file permissions, really the key thing you are missing is that that 'deleting' is not controlled on the file or directory you're trying to delete. To delete a file or directory in unix, all you need is write permissions on the parent directory. However, I wouldn't recommend going this route as doing this will just cause a weird error in sabre/dav, which might leave clients in a confused state. It would result in a 500 error, not the expected 403 error.

How to set gnome-terminal's character set encoding according to the system one calls?

The employees of our company use gnome-terminal run from Debian workstations to access a variety of systems running different O/Ss on our local network. Everything works very well except that the host systems and their applications use different character sets, either ISO-8859-1 ("Latin 1") or UTF-8, and the server applications notably do NOT adapt to the locale of the user. This requires the user to manually set gnome-terminal's character set encoding each time one starts a new session!
(In case that's not clear, we always want to log into system X using ISO-8859-1, and always log into system Y using UTF-8. This has to do with the relative antiquity of the O/S of each system, the older ones having little or no accomodation of UTF-8 while the newer ones deal rather grumpily with ISO-8859-1.)
It seems to me that gnome-terminal's character set encoding should be associated with the system one's logging into instead of the system one's calling from. And that therefore, the character set should be one of the parameters that can be pre-set in the profile. This is the way other terminal emulators behave, notably the Windows and Mac emulators that we use outside the office.
But in lieu of configuring it in the profile (which is not possible), does anyone know a way of setting the character set encoding as part of a command line invocation of gnome-terminal?
I've been trying to solve this annoyance off-and-on for years... any solution would receive our eternal gratitude. :)
in the good old times, gnome-terminal support --disable-factory, you can set up for local editing files:
#!/bin/sh
export GDM_LANG="de_DE#euro"
export LANG="de_DE#euro"
export RC_LANG="de_DE#euro"
export LC_ALL="de_DE#euro"
gnome-terminal --disable-factory
or remote access to a linux-box:
#!/bin/sh
export GDM_LANG="de_DE#euro"
export LANG="de_DE#euro"
export RC_LANG="de_DE#euro"
export LC_ALL="de_DE#euro"
gnome-terminal --disable-factory --tab --title="Server1 DE" --command "ssh user#Server1"
Now at gnome 3.10 I get
... Option "--disable-factory" is no longer supported ...
So, I am with you and will keep looking ...
Mario
This worked for me.
LANG=en_US.iso885915 /usr/bin/gnome-terminal

service created but not started

I am trying to run a driver I created as a service. I managed to create a service out of the driver (using "sc.exe create ..."): The service now appears in the registry (under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/services/mydriver). However the service cannot be started! When I use net start [myservice], I get the following output:
error 1275: This driver has been blocked from loading
One thing looked suspicious to me: The entry in the registry for my driver: The value of "ImagePath" was "\??[correct path]". I manually removed the "\??\" so that the correct path was left. However it did not solve the problem, instead I got an other error message (Error 123: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect).
By searching on the internet, I found out that this error 1275 indicates that a key in the registry is missing or corrupted. This makes sense as I modified it manually, so the value of "ImagePath" is probably corrupted. However I don't see anything wrong with the value I entered:
"C:\ledrivertest\driver1\bin\hello.sys"
Is there some kind of special syntax for the path of a driver binary which I don't know about?
I use Windows 7.
Thanks in advance
Since you are running on a 64 bit system, and you haven't signed the driver, the most likely explanation for error 1275 is that Windows blocked the driver due to it being unsigned.

Resources