IT

Snapdrive Service won’t start

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Had an issue recently where a fresh install of SnapDrive (7.0.3) wouldn’t complete and gave the following error  “Product: SnapDrive — Error 1920.Service SnapDrive (SWSvc) failed to start.  Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services and check your Event Log for more information.”

The server is located in a DMZ on a separate domain and is isolated from the network and the internet. I spent ages looking at this and eventually decided to run a “netstat -ano” to see what the service was doing. For whatever reason it looks like it’s trying to connect to GoDaddy’s CRL server. It seems that as the package is signed by netapp, part of the install downloads a new crl to make sure that it’s valid. Temporarily allowing my host out to the net on port 80 fixed the install issues. Incidentally, as soon as it’s installed you can close that port. From what I can tell it doesn’t check the CRL again….

 

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Meike MK-910 Nikon Quick Review

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I bough the Meike MK-910 fro Ebay recently. I did have the MK900 but found it odd in some ways. It appeared to not fire the flash every so often. It would fire the TTL but then nothing. Seemed it was confused with the metering I believe. Forcing the camera (a d7100) out of auto-iso seems to make it work.

 

Anyway, the 910 does none of these things. It’s much better. The HSS Works well too. It works as a remote in Manual mode which I believe people had issues with on the MK-900. Not used it a great deal however, but all in all I’m pretty pleased. They seemed to have fixed the battery drain the 900 had too. This one doesnt instanlty drop to two bars the moment you put batteries in!

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2012 r2 dc lsass.exe crash

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Crashing lsass.exe on your shiny 2012r2 DC? It’s a known bug according to PSS. You have three choices. a) use a different DC to rename things. b) turn of all auditing on the DC (seriously) c) apply a hotfix that you can only get from PSS.

Personally, I’ve gone for option “a”. We need the auditing and option c had a number of “it’s your fault if it breaks” warning attached to it that scared me a little. I’ll await the real patch which apparently will be “soon”. THough that’s in Microsoft Minutes so don’ hold your breath….

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MK 900 and D7100

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I’ve had this flash for some time now, and whilst initially impressed I’m getting slowly more disappointed with it. It seems to consistantly underexpose photos. I’ve no idea why. There are certain combinations of having the cameras ISO on auto and matrix metering enabled where the flash will fire but it always seems to be at 1/128. Changing the iso to manaul (and keeping all the settings the same) fixes it. How does that make a difference? Another fix is to enable spot metering. I’m very confused. It seems most problematioc in contrasty areas or when I focus on something that is black. I can’t recommend this flash unfortunately. I’m now looking for another. I seem to keep spending £100 or so on flashes that arent perfect. MAybe I should bite the bullet and just get the sb910…

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DFM missing statistics

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Had the issue recently where the DFM would stop reporting statistics on all of our volumes on some controllers. After spending an eternity digging around it seems that if you enable debug logging on the dfm you will see an error returned by the controller that it has run out of memory. You can increase it but please check this burt first http://support.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/bol?Type=Detail&Display=472940

To increase the memory from the default of 262144 do “options perf.dblade_zapi.buf_limit and select a higher number (in bytes). Try 307200 (300k) first then slowly increase it if you have no joy.