iSCSI | Steve Dolphin

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ReadyNAS NV+ and Encryption (TrueCrypt)

I have been looking for a way to encrypt data on my ReadyNAS NV+ for the last couple of weeks and there’s nothing built in, and as of yet, no-one’s written a third party add-on that allows it to happen.

Having previously used TrueCrypt I thought I’d investigate options with that, and due to the fact that you can’t encrypt just a network share the options you’re left with are:

Make a TrueCrypt container on your NAS box and put all your data in that
Somehow hook up something iSCSI and encrypt that entire drive.

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snapshot February 2011

To advertise the success of the IT Service Desk in the last year we have producted a newsletter for internal circulation, it’s a high level overview of all of projects that we’ve successfully completed and I’ve been the owner and runner of almost all of them!

Click the thumbnails below for the two-page .pdf (~700kb).

Jumbo Frames and Flow Control on HP Procurve 5406zl

Following on from the external network audit that was ordered an HP Procurve 5406zl was purchased. I was assured by the auditor that this would handle future iSCSI requirements as well as the current network size and traffic.

Imagine my horror when I read that I could only utilise Flow Control or Jumbo Frames. I want both for an iSCSI implementation! Worse still, I couldn’t even find the option to turn Jumbo Frames off and on!

After a few hours of flicking backwards and forwards through the various configuration pages available on the web interface I finally did that thing that people like me use as a last resort and RTFM. I found my answer (below) and now everything works perfectly – you can have both on the 5406 and I imagine on a few other model numbers too, there is a note in one of the firmware releases which explains that it was incorrectly published in some previous document.

How to do it:

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Quick: iscsicpl.exe for easier configuration of your iSCSI access from Windows Server 2008 R2 Core installs and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

This will be the quickest one yet. Bored of using all those iscsicli commands to configure access to your iSCSI hosts, well, certainly in the latest version of Windows Server you don’t have to:

iscsicpl.exe