Ondrej Žilinec – IT Blog

Last two weeks I had to update some NTP servers from one German company. When I requested new firmware I received following e-mail:

Dear Sir,

 unfortunately, I cannot provide a new firmware since your compact flash card is too small and the action might end up in a system’s inconsistency.

Thus, you are also not the only customer who is affected by this, we offer bigger compact flash cards for 65€ each. Please let me know whether this is of interest for you and if you need an official offer.

Mit freundlichem Gruß / With kind regards

So this made my very upset. To be able to upgrade to the newest version of firmware I had to pay 65EUR for new flashcard. So I wrote couple e-mail to this company. I wanted to know the reason why I need to invest more to NTP server. I found out that firmware got big and it cannot be uploaded into flash which came with NTP server. This looked weird to me. Why would I have to invest into device if manufacter’s engineers made a mistake. I already decided not to sell manufacter’s devices. And I though that was end of the story.

Today I received following e-mail:

Dear Ondrej,

 

I just wanted to let you know that we dramatically improved our update procedure and, after an intensive clean-up, released

the new firmware version 5.34h which can be installed on 64MB compact flash cards without any problems. The new release is 4 MB (~25%) smaller (!) than the previous version without removing any features.

 

Although you already expressed your extreme dissatisfaction with our products and decided for yourself to not recommend or

buy Meinberg products in the future, your feedback helped us to improve our software and I sincerely thank you for that.

 

Best Regards,

 Heiko

 

So it’s funny how some angry and mad e-mails can change such a things. Now we can upgrade our devices. But I don’t think we will offer them anymore to customers 🙂

I had to change NTP servers on 40 ESX servers today. When I started to click this settings via vShere Client I was bored after two pieces 🙂 Then I have decided to use vShere PowerCLI.

Run vShere PowerCLI. Then I had to connect to Virtual Infrastructure server:

Connect-VIServer vCenterSERVER_Name.domain

List all ESX servers and put this list into variable:

$hosts=Get-Cluster Cluster | Get-VMHost

And the last, run couple commands to proceed:

ForEach ($ESX in $hosts)

{

     Remove-VMHostNtpServer -NtpServer “NTP_SERVER_OLD1” -VMHost $ESX | Out-Null;

     Remove-VMHostNtpServer -NtpServer “NTP_SERVER_OLD2” -VMHost $ESX | Out-Null;

     Add-VmHostNtpServer -NtpServer “NTP_SERVER_NEW_01” -VMHost $ESX | Out-Null;

     Add-VmHostNtpServer -NtpServer “NTP_SERVER_NEW_02” -VMHost $ESX | Out-Null;

     Get-VMHostService -VMHost $ESX | Where-Object {$_.key -eq “ntpd” } | Restart-VMHostService -Confirm:$false | Out-Null

}

And everything was set in couple of seconds 🙂

Remove-VMHostNtpServer – removes NTP settings for ESX

Add-VMHostNtpServer – adds NTP settings for ESX

Last command restarted ntpd service.

Have a nice day,