HP C-Class Blades single point of failure

We powered down the SAN for maintenance about a week ago. Prior to that, we have to power down all the servers connected directly to the SAN first. We have a C-class blade enclosure with five servers currently. After the SAN upgrade was completed, we tried to power the enclosure back up. Guess what. The onboard administrator of enclosure failed to start up. We attempted to power up the server and it failed. We contacted HP support. The answer was a hardware failure. The part arrived at UPS store close to Pearson airport. We figured out we went to there to pick it up instead of waiting for them to deliver. Replace the onboard admin and all servers power up. Now, update with latest firmware and reload the config from backup. If you don't have config file backup, it won't take long to re-config it. So, make sure you save the config before power down the whole enclosure.

The HP support told me the servers would keep running if the onboard admin failed while the servers were powered on. However, if I powered down the servers, you could not power them back up until onboard admin was replaced. One thing forget to ask was "can I replace onboard admin while the servers are running".

Activesync Attempt with Exchange gives 0x80072EE2 error

This issue was resolved few months ago actually. What happens was one of the directors always had trouble sync with the Exchange Server. However, he didn't want to use Blackberry. He had 5 different WM phone at home. He tried all of them and still had the same issue. Everytime, he had to power cycle (turn off the phone and take the battery out) the phone, then it will sync again. After a while, it will not work again.

Eventually, we found out he plugged the phone to laptop to sync the notes through USB. Our internal Exchange Server ip is 10.x.x.x. The webmail address he used to sync wirelessly is a public address of course. Based on the research found in internet, it has to do with Windows Mobile DNS cache not being cleared properly when USB cable is unplugged. When plugged into the desktop to sync inside the office, it will use the internal address for Exchange server. After unplugged from USB, it will cause issue of course because the DNS will point to internal address of Exchange server instead of the webmail address. Workaround....powercycle after unplug from a machine in the internal network.

Persistent Binding with VMWare

Persistent Binding is highly recommended in SAN environment. However, this is not required for ESX Server 3. ESX Server 3 uses UUID's written to the LVM of the disk. For luns containing VMFS volumes and the ESX Server boot disks, persistent binding is no longer required.

You can check UUID in Linux with following command.
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

Version of OS on Windows Mobile Phone

Have some time today to re-arrange all the notes and printout. One of them is about the version of Windows Mobile Phone on your pocket PC. I believe it is from Pocket PC Central.

Version Number and OS Version

3.0.9348 Pocket PC 2000
3.0.11171 Pocket PC 2002
4.20.xxxx Windows Mobile 2003
4.21.xxxx Windows Mobile 2003 SE
5.1.xxxx Windows Mobile 5
5.2.xxxx Windows Mobile 6