• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Xsan

    Recycling The Promise X10

    The Promise X30 and beyond have been out for some time. I find that as the older X10 units reach the next phase of their lifecycle, removing LUNs and RAIDs from the units is a necessity. While many are put back into production as near-line or backup storage (with new drives even) these RAIDs still need to be cleaned off. As such, an example of doing so might be creating one large LUN each of an E+J pair. First, let’s delete our spare drives. To do so, click on Spare Drives in the sidebar. Then click on the Delete tab. Check all of the boxes and then click on the…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Xsan

    Update the Promise Vtrak Firmware Using SSH

    Updating the firmware on Promise arrays is straight forward enough from the WebPAM. But what happens if a firmware update goes funky and you can’t get into the WebPAM any longer (ah, the joys of beta testing)? Well, you can always download an older firmware and reload it provided you can ssh or telnet into the host. Download from http://www.promise.com/support/download.aspx?m=93&region=en-global for your given model. Then, you need the firmware accessible to the Promise chassis via tftp. A simple tftp GUI tool is available at http://ww2.unime.it/flr/tftpserver. Once configured, log into the Promise array and then use the ptiflash command to update the firmware. In the following command we’ll use the -s option to identify…