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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for May 3rd, 2019

Do not blur, but do randomly add noise or move pixels – Censoring image in GIMP – Graphic Design Stack Exchange

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/05/03

Blurring is like a hash function: it cannot be undone, but with enough plain text to blur examples, you can reconstruct the plain text: [WayBack] Why blurring sensitive information is a bad idea | dheera.net | Dheera Venkatraman’s web site

As an alternative, randomly add noise or move pixels. I used  [WayBack] Censoring image in GIMP – Graphic Design Stack Exchange. For the example on the right, I used “Filters → Noise → Spread” from the Stack Exchange answer.

With enough randomness, it is much harder to construct plain/hash combinations.

–jeroen

Posted in Image Editing, LifeHacker, Power User, Security, The Gimp | Leave a Comment »

Cleaning SILVER WITHOUT losing the Ag!

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/05/03

Interesting trick explained at [WayBack] Cleaning SILVER WITHOUT losing the Ag! which works very quickly as you can see in the below video.

What happens is that you transform Silver-Sulfide plus Aluminium into Silver plus Aluminium-Sulfide.

After that, the [WayBack] Aluminium-Sulfide reacts with water and transforms into Aluminium-Hydroxide and Hydrogen-Sulfide. The latter smells like rotten eggs, so better do this in a well ventilated area.

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

My LSI adapters and ESXi 6.5

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/05/03

So I won’t forget:

Direct download links in September 2017:

[WayBack] How to upgrade LSI MegaRaid SAS controller firmware using FreeDOS – Teksupport.in

Notes:

LSI provider install (SIM-S, SIMS, CIM, WEBM):

  1. Download the latest version (at the time of writing VMW-ESX-5.5.0-lsiprovider-500.04.V0.66-0002-5751577.zip)
  2. Unzip into /tmp
  3. esxcli software vib install -f -v /tmp/vmware-esx-provider-lsiprovider.vib
  4. wait for the VIB install to complete
  5. suspend or shutdown all VMs
  6. reboot the ESXi machine
  7. esxcli system wbem set --enable true
  8. Browse to https://192.168.71.91/ui/#/host/monitor/hardware/storage to see if SIM-S is working

MegaRAID Storage Manager (MSM) operation notes

A few tricky things to get right:

  • waiting: MSM is unbelievably slow (starting on SSD takes 10 seconds; discovery 30; connecting to host 60 – without any indication something is happening; fetching host data another 60;
  • old MSM versions are unstable (especially 14.x and lower), so keep current
  • ensure the hosts file on both the ESXi and Windows side match (otherwise it won’t discover anything, or discover as 0.0.0.0)
  • enable promiscuous mode on your vSwitch
  • if all else fails, disable any firewalls then enable bit by bit to see where it went wrong

Great installation steps:

MegaCLI installs

  1. Download the latest version that has VMware support (at the time of writing 8-07-07_MegaCLI.zip)
  2. Unzip into /tmp
  3. esxcli software vib install -f -v /tmp/VmwareMN/vmware-esx-MegaCli-8.07.07.vib
  4. wait for the VIB install to complete

Now you can the command /opt/lsi/MegaCLI/MegaCli (yes the casing of these two is different!) but you must to it in that directory, or ensure the LD_LIBARY_PATH contains /opt/lsi/MegaCLI.

StorCLI installs

Based on [WayBack] StorCLI unter VMware vSphere installieren – Thomas-Krenn-Wiki

  1. Download the latest version that has VMware support (at the time of writing 1.23.02_StorCLI.zip)
  2. Recursively uncompress the ZIP file into /tmp**
  3. esxcli software vib install -f -v /tmp/storcli_All_OS/Vmware-OP/vmware-esx-storcli-1.23.02.vib
  4. wait for the VIB install to complete

Now you can the command /opt/lsi/storcli/storcli but you must to it in that directory, or ensure the LD_LIBARY_PATH contains /opt/lsi/storcli.

Example:

execute-storcli.sh /cALL show all | grep 'Controller = \|Model = \|Serial Number = \|Firmware'a

The vib file in "Vmware-NDS/" folder works with native driver.
The vib file in "Vmware-MN/" folder works with VMKlinux driver.

So I did a bit more searching based on the files in the VMware directories and came up with this list:

  • storcli_All_OS/Vmware/storcli.zip
    • Looks like it targets ESXi 3.x and older
  • storcli_All_OS/Vmware-MN/vmware-esx-storcli-1.23.02.vib wit  storcli_All_OS/Vmware-MN/VMWARE_MN_Readme.txt
    • Targets the vmklinux drivers that are being phased out with ESXi 5.5 and up
  • storcli_All_OS/Vmware-OP/vmware-esx-storcli-1.23.02.vib with storcli_All_OS/Vmware-OP/VMWARE_MN_NDS_Readme.txt
    • Targets the New Driver architecture introduced with ESXi 5.5 and used more and more since then

Background reading:

** unzip doesn’t work:

# unzip -d /tmp/ 1.23.02_StorCLI.zip
Archive: 1.23.02_StorCLI.zip
inflating: 1.23.02_StorCLI.txt
unzip: short read

But a combination of 7za and unzip does work:

# 7za x -o/tmp/ 1.23.02_StorCLI.zip
7-Zip (a) [32] 16.02 : Copyright (c) 1999-2016 Igor Pavlov : 2016-05-21
p7zip Version 16.02 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,32 bits,20 CPUs Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L v4 @ 1.80GHz (406F1),ASM,AES-NI)

Scanning the drive for archives:
1 file, 48778476 bytes (47 MiB)

Extracting archive: 1.23.02_StorCLI.zip
--
Path = 1.23.02_StorCLI.zip
Type = zip
Physical Size = 48778476

Everything is Ok

Files: 2
Size: 48928561
Compressed: 48778476

# unzip -d /tmp/ /tmp/storcli_All_OS.zip 
Archive:  /tmp/storcli_All_OS.zip
   creating: storcli_All_OS/
   creating: storcli_All_OS/EFI/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/EFI/license.txt
   creating: storcli_All_OS/EFI/UDK/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/EFI/UDK/license.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/EFI/UDK/storcli.efi
   creating: storcli_All_OS/FreeBSD/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/FreeBSD/FreeBSD_readme.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/FreeBSD/license.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/FreeBSD/storcli.tar
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/FreeBSD/storcli64.tar
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Linux/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Linux/license.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Linux/LINUX_Readme.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Linux/storcli-1.23.02-1.noarch.rpm
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Linux-OEL-Sparc/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Linux-OEL-Sparc/license_OELSparc.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Linux-OEL-Sparc/storcli64-1.23.02-1.sparc64.rpm
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Linux-ppc/
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Linux-ppc/Big Endian/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Linux-ppc/Big Endian/license.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Linux-ppc/Big Endian/storcli.tar
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Linux-ppc/Little Endian/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Linux-ppc/Little Endian/license.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Linux-ppc/Little Endian/Readme.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Linux-ppc/Little Endian/storcli64_1.23.02_ppc64el.deb
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Solaris/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Solaris/license.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Solaris/SOLARIS_Readme.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Solaris/storcli.pkg
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Solaris Sparc/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Solaris Sparc/license.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Solaris Sparc/storcli.pkg
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Ubuntu/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Ubuntu/read_me.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Ubuntu/storcli_1.23.02_all.deb
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware/license.txt
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware/Linux/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware/Linux/storcliKL-1.23.02-1.noarch.rpm
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware/Rel_read_me.txt.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware/storcli.zip
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware/Windows/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware/Windows/StorCLIKL.zip
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware-MN/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware-MN/license.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware-MN/vmware-esx-storcli-1.23.02.vib
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware-MN/VMWARE_MN_Readme.txt
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware-OP/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware-OP/license.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware-OP/vmware-esx-storcli-1.23.02.vib
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Vmware-OP/VMWARE_MN_NDS_Readme.txt
   creating: storcli_All_OS/Windows/
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Windows/license.txt
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Windows/storcli.exe
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Windows/storcli64.exe
  inflating: storcli_All_OS/Windows/WIN_ReadMe.txt

9260-8i firmware update

  1. Download the latest firmware (at the time of writing 12.15.0-0239_MR_2108_SAS_FW_2.130.403-4660.zip) into /tmp
  2. unzip -d /tmp/ /tmp/12.15.0-0239_MR_2108_SAS_FW_2.130.403-4660.zip
  3. Find out the controller number
  4. Where 0 is the controller number, execute/opt/lsi/storcli/storcli /c0 download file=/tmp/mr2108fw.rom
  5. Wait for the firmware update to complete
  6. Suspend or shutdown all VMs
  7. Reboot

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi6.5, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | 2 Comments »