Having been an admin in the storage industry for many years, I’ve always paid close attention to the ETAs (Engineering Technical Advisories) provided by the OEMs and seen first-hand how this provided information can save a client environment from catastrophe and/or seriously uncomfortable outages. As readers likely already know, these alerts are sent as emails by the OEM and sent to those most able to follow and deploy the recommendation.
As a storage administrator, you don’t want to miss any of these. As the supervisor for a team of admins, your familiarity with the ETAs’ contents can also be beneficial to the success of your team. Yet, in 2021 we all get so many emails that it can be difficult to manage the firehose of information too often hitting your InBoxes. This EMC Isilon “Tech Tip” has been created to simplify your access to Dell EMC ETAs, in case your email InBox is difficult to manage, you’re not getting these ETAs (but should) or, as a manager, you want a cursory view so you can check status of any advisory with members of your team.
At the Dell website, here are two resources worthy of bookmarking. Once bookmarked, you could schedule yourself a regular, recurring review to ensure no advisories slip past you.
- Dell EMC KnowledgeBase & Patch Release Notes
These are a mixture of KBs (Knowledge Base) and patch release notes, often sent as emails and specifically for code levels used in the environment. Alerts are often sent directly when logging ino to your environment.
Location to Bookmark: http://www.dell.com/support/search/en-us#sort=relevancy&f:iuxType=[Knowledgebase]&f:langFacet=[en]
Go to this Dell page and type in (or include the model): Isilon.
Dell EMC Isilon Top Service Topics
This document contains the list of Top Services Topics for Isilon, identified by DELL EMC Support as the most Trending Topics for the month of April 2020.
- Patch README – OneFS 8.2.1_UGA-RUP_2020-01_262889
This patch addresses multiple issues with the userspace in OneFS
- Isilon OneFS: Understanding Source Based Routing(SBR) in Isilon
Describes how standard routing and Source Based Routing (SBR) works within an Isilon node
- Patch README: 8120_KGA_RUP_2020_02_264786
This patch addresses multiple issues with the kernel in OneFS
- Patch README: OneFS 8.2.1_UGA-RUP_2020-02_264778
This patch addresses multiple issues with the userspace in OneFS
- Isilon: How to upgrade Isilon OneFS 8.1.2.0 to latest HealthCheck & RUPs available
Instructions on how to upgrade Isilon OneFS 8.1.2.0 to latest HealthCheck & RUPs available
- Patch README: OneFS 8.2.1_KGA-RUP_2020-02_264780
Provides you with details about the issue fixes that are in this patch
- Isilon: Node will not provision in to existing Nodepool because wrong SSD was ordered
Two new nodes would not provision in to the nodepool. Isilon Nodes track the factory-installed hardware in special, hidden files, called “receipt” files or “PSI” files
- Isilon: InsightIQ – Client reports show zero throughput for some clients intermittently
When viewing a client breakout, or filtering for a specific client in a report, the throughput for a client can sometimes show a value of zero
- Isilon: InsightIQ – Adding a cluster fails: Error getting cluster configuration. Please try again.: …
This KB explains a very specific failure in adding a OneFS cluster to InsightIQ
- Isilon: NDMP backup of AVSCAN quarantined files fails with “Failed to open file – Permission Denied”
Isilon cluster NDMP backups are failing with the following error: NDMP Service Error: Failed to open file – Permission denied. The files that could not be backed-up were discovered to be quarantined by the AVSCAN solution
- Dell EMC ETA General Search
This tool can be use for general searches or can be useful if/when users have the specific ETA # they’re seeking. In my screen grab below, I easily found 1,846 ETAs, which I can sort by relevancy or date.
Location to Bookmark: https://www.dell.com/support/search/en-us#q=ETA&first=50&sort=relevancy&numberOfResults=50&f:langFacet=[en]
These DELL EMC Isilon ETAs are very informative, mainly because they point out a problem that the Users have already experienced and can impact a wide variety of Isilon clients across storage platforms.
Make sure any critical/applicable announcements are known to upper management and the key stakeholders in your company. These can range from low impact to CRITICAL (and I’ve seen missed ETAs completely bring a storage array to it’s knees). At the same time bringing attention to areas where you keep your environment healthy and functional is one of the most important attributes of a valued storage administrator.
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