Monthly Archives: February 2008

Riverbed vs WAAS … part one

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I’ve been re-visiting the whole Riverbed vs Cisco WAAS situation again. We have a few WAAS appliances and modules in production, and they do the job – for now. I am concerned about the scalability of their solution and it is my opinion that Riverbed has the edge here and in other areas – except price. I’m not one to really care about price usually because I am more concerned with the outcome – but sure it is a consideration for the business. Hence, I’ve gone back to have a look at it all again.

Watch the Riverbed video here

It is impressive stuff. Cisco has the edge on price – but not much else. Riverbed is a clear winner when it comes to ease of deployment, scalability and technology. I’ll come back and justify my comments with some data soon.

Cisco ACE – weird log entry

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I’ve logged a call a few days ago with Cerulean (hopefully it will make it to the TAC) regarding a strange log entry I am seeing in version 6.3 of the ACE software. A health probe is failing, however the target server is not actually defined in the context in which the probe resides. (It actually resides in a different context – so it should not be ‘seen’ by this probe).

There’s no reference to this server in the context in question, yet the probe thinks it is. In any case, I hope the TAC will let us know whats going on. It isn’t affecting production, just a weird thing which I hope isn’t a sign of something more sinister.

Update: The TAC got back to me; they are equally baffled. They’ve got all the details they need and are trying to find out what’s going on.

OSX and Avamar testing

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Avamar (at the time of test) only has a client for OSX 10.4 (Tiger). We wanted to test the Avamar client on OSX to ensure that it could backup the ‘illegal’ folder and filenames seen by the OS. (‘Illegal’ in terms of what other OS’s normally expect – we actually wanted the files to be moved to another fileserver – that’s another story).

For example – the sample set of data is:

drwxr-xr-x 3 camerons camerons  4096 Feb 12 12:40 ⢠ALL FILES â¢
drwxr-xr-x 4 camerons camerons  4096 Feb 12 12:42 FONTS?????
drwxr-xr-x 2 camerons camerons  4096 Feb 12 12:42 DIRECT_LB | DIRECT
drwxr-xr-x 4 camerons camerons  4096 Feb 12 12:42 RANGES07:08
-rw-r----- 1 camerons camerons 74321 Feb 12 12:42 lanyard 1 ???.jpg
drwxr-xr-x 2 camerons camerons  4096 Feb 12 12:42 New_Change27:3

Obviously, some of the filenames above are fine – but some are a little wacko. The restore operation completes – but in the test the restored folder was not visible in the finder – only via terminal. Restart of the osx vm was necessary (the finder seemed to hang and I couldnt restart it) and then the restored files were visible. This could be a quirk with the ‘hacked’ osx vm.

Note that also the terminal shows some folder names as including a ‘:’, whereas in Finder they would appear as ‘/’ – for date format names. This is another quirk I suppose.

In summary, the Avamar client for OSX works as expected, even taking into account the non-standard filenames.