Monthly Archive for February, 2009

Single Instance Storage

Published
by
Shohn
on February 10, 2009
in Scripts and Windows
. 0 Comments

Single Instance Storage

I was working on a setting up a new storage / backup server for one of my networks.

Some of the requirements were data deduplication, compression, etc.

I had first hacked something together using Windows 2003 R2 and Windows Deployment Services’ Single Instance Storage functionality that is baked in.

It worked; however, it was not without problems. Namely it seemed to take forever for SIS to catch up. To be fair, this was volumes holding at least 2TB a piece.

In addition, the solution was lacking many basic tools for manipulating SIS volumes. 

After setting up storage server and logging in, I dropped to a command line.

sisadmin /i e:

Install SIS on the volume.

sisadmin /e e:

Enable SIS on the volume.

Now for testing…

C:\>
e:
copy c:\windows\system32\shell32.dll file1.dll

 Directory of E:\

11/08/2007  02:55 AM        10,508,288 file1.dll
11/08/2007  02:55 AM        10,508,288 file2.dll
11/08/2007  02:55 AM        10,508,288 file3.dll
               3 File(s)     31,524,864 bytes
               0 Dir(s)  1,887,278,223,360 bytes free

E:\>sisadmin /l e:
Listing SIS controlled files on volume ‘e:’.
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file1.dll
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file2.dll
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file3.dll
3 SIS controlled files found on volume ‘e:’.

E:\>dir C:\windows\system32\shell32.dll
 Volume in drive C is OS
 Volume Serial Number is EC25-1163

 Directory of C:\windows\system32

11/08/2007  02:55 AM        10,508,288 shell32.dll
               1 File(s)     10,508,288 bytes
               0 Dir(s)   7,007,498,240 bytes free

E:\>copy c:\windows\system32\shell32.dll file4.dll
        1 file(s) copied.

E:\>dir
 Volume in drive E is LD0-R0-1000
 Volume Serial Number is 8205-C4FF

 Directory of E:\

11/08/2007  02:55 AM        10,508,288 file1.dll
11/08/2007  02:55 AM        10,508,288 file2.dll
11/08/2007  02:55 AM        10,508,288 file3.dll
11/08/2007  02:55 AM        10,508,288 file4.dll
               4 File(s)     42,033,152 bytes
               0 Dir(s)  1,887,267,696,640 bytes free

E:\>sisadmin /l e:
Listing SIS controlled files on volume ‘e:’.
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file1.dll
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file2.dll
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file3.dll
E3E636E3-F794-11DD-90C3-002219AFCCE9.sis <- E:\file4.dll
4 SIS controlled files found on volume ‘e:’.

It works!

Now I have to test this using real data – this is just a few files.

IPhone and Cisco VPN

Published
by
Shohn
on February 9, 2009
in Email
. 0 Comments

I broke down and got an iPhone.

So far I am impressed. It syncs to Exchange, has Cisco VPN, and a number of other things. One of the things I had trouble getting over at first was the idea of a “glass” phone. It looks so breakable and was definitely a turn off as I go through phones about once a year at least due to having bull in china cabinet syndrome. I found this amazing contraption that you put over the phone that then protects it. That seemed to help the psychological block that I had.

I setup my company VPN to go through the phone. To do this, I took the string out of the Cisco VPN pcf file and passed it through a decoder. There is an online version available here ->

http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/bin/cisco-decode