Monthly Archives: July 2016

STOR2RRD to the rescue once again!

Hi,

A few weeks ago we decided to upgrade the firmware on couple of storage systems. Everything seemed to go as planned but after the upgrade we started to notice some latency issues.

I won’t go into detail what was wrong (hint, HDD firmware can cause some serious issues!)- but this tool, STOR2RRD has saved us loads and loads of time – and is as simple as any storage monitoring tool can be. It ain’t perfect but it pointed us in the right direction and helped with getting this specific issue solved.

Cannot recommend this tool enough (and it is free and open source licensed under the GPL v3!).

Bgrds,
Finnur

azure-cli and Azure DNS!

Hi!

I have been looking at using Azure DNS for a couple of weeks for my domains. So, yesterday morning when my SO was still sleeping I went in for the kill and researched options on how I could import BIND zone files without having access to a machine with Powershell.

Hello azure-cli! A magical little tool that runs on pretty much all platforms capable of running node.js. My interest in Azure just skyrocketed after finding out MS actually has spent some time working on this brilliant little tool. A quick “npm -g install azure-cli” from my MacOSX laptop got me going.

But back to the Azure DNS magic.

First – make sure you have a copy of your BIND zone file.
Next, Switch to azure-cli ARM config mode: azure config mode arm
Next, Create the domain in Azure DNS: azure network dns zone create myresourcegroup myawesomedomain.com
Next, Import the BIND zone file: azure network dns zone import myresourcegroup myawesomedomain.com myawesomedomain.com.txt (Where myawesomedomain.com.txt is my BIND zone file)

Now, check out what NS servers you were assigned with the following command:
azure network dns record-set show myresourcegroup “myawesomedomain.com” “@” NS
Then go to your domain registrar control panel and point your domain to the Azure DNS servers listed with the above command.

You can get more info from this MS documentation site.

And….if you have a huge domain estate then you might be interested in knowing that the Men&Mice Suite actually supports managing DNS records in Azure DNS! 🙂

Bgrds,
Finnur