J.Zimmerman's questions

I am working with 3 clusters of LefHand SAN iSCSI storage arrays. The modules are all older NSM 150s and NSM 160s (super micro server hardware, sata disks). The workload is low priority and all modules are no longer covered under a warranty or service contract.

They have been working just fine in their current state, but one unit has had a hard disk failure. Under warranty or service contract a new hard drive was initialized with a special utility by LeftHand Network support. Obviously I no longer have the option without paying a lot of money on an aging storage cluster.

So I am wondering if anyone has successfully put a foreign disk into a LeftHand RAID configuration and if so, how did you accomplish this? Just putting a new drive in the bay complains about it not having a lefthand signature when I add it to the RAID. My next step is to try to mirror one of the good drives to a new drive with the same (or greater) amount of sectors.

Last ditch efforts would be to remove the lefthand software all together and get ZFS filesystems spanning all the modules if OpenSolaris will install appropriately.

I am migrating DNS zones (both forward and reverse) from Bind to Windows DNS. The reverse entries in the existing Bind server have not been maintained all that well for the static zones and I would rather not just import all the records.

I have however moved all the A records over to the Windows setup and made sure they are cleaned up. Now I have empty reverse zones.

What I am wondering is if there is a relatively easy way to tell the DNS server (Windows 2008 R2, Active Directory integrated), either via GUI or cmd line, to go ahead and create PTR records for all of the A records.

I've got a print server in our Windows 2003 domain with a lot of print queues on it. We are seeing a significant amount of SNMP scans coming from this server which we think are unnecessary. Everything related to the print server itself is functioning fine, but the network team would like the scans to stop.

We can see the scans as they happen on the switch. I have installed Wireshark and can see the scans happen as well. I can see programs that are listening for connections via things like CurrPorts.

This server has had several maintainers over the years. There are residual drivers and things that don't need to be there. Unfortunately I can't do anything too drastic to clean things up or clean install the server because it is our primary print server our network relies on. We have plans to replace it within the next year or two.

So my question is....

How can I pinpoint which program/process on the Windows 2003 server is generating the SNMP scans?

We currently run two DNS systems. The Windows domain uses the Windows DNS for an internal domain. Our BIND9 installation serves our public domain DNS. Since we run BIND on Unix it has been dubbed the "Unix DNS". All of our Unix/Linux systems have FQDNs of our public domain. All of the Windows systems joined to the domain have FQDNs of our internal network, but also have a BIND entry their hostname.publicdomain.edu if they need to be accessed from the Internet.

We are looking to consolidate our DNS systems when we move our domain to Windows 2008 R2. The goal is to use BIND to do everything. I know this is possible, but details from Microsoft are a bit scarce. We would like to ditch or minimize using or relying on the Windows DNS and DHCP. We would also like to consider moving to a single domain space rather than just having our BIND installation host the separate zone our Windows system is currently handling.

I have done a fair amount of research on doing this and have enough information to move forward with a test environment, but I am looking for others who have already done this or something similar.

Pros? Cons? Gotchas?