thinking sysadmin

1. Create a Fibre Channel LUN on your NetApp and map it to your NexentaStor machine (I’m using version 3.0.2 in this example). For this example, I’ve created a 10GB LUN on a filer running ONTAP 7.2:

   netapp01> lun show /vol/nexenta01/lun01/lun
           /vol/nexenta01/lun01/lun      10g (10737418240)   (r/w, online, mapped)
   

   There are eight paths from our NetApp to our NexentaStor appliance, so the LUN appears eight times on the “qlc” adapter (lines 9-16 below):

   nmc@nexenta01:/$ lunsync
   Cleanup obsolete (dangling) device links?  Yes
   Re-enumerating LUNs... done.
   
   nmc@nexenta01:/$ show lun
   LUN ID      Device    Type         Size       Volume     Mounted Attach GUID
   c0t0d0      sd0       disk         272.3GB    syspool    no      mega_sas 60024e805102c100118a3fa70ae8937a
   c1t0d0      sd128     cdrom        No Media              no      ata    -
   c2t5*DDDd0  sd6       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c2t5*DDDd0  sd4       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c2t5*DDDd0  sd7       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c2t5*DDDd0  sd5       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c3t5*DDDd0  sd3       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c3t5*DDDd0  sd2       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c3t5*DDDd0  sd8       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c3t5*DDDd0  sd1       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   syspo~/swap           zvol         1.0GB      syspool    no
   

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Disclaimer: I am not a FirePass administrator; only an end-user and have no other relationship with F5. There may be better methods to address this issue; please comment if you know of one.

See also: f5vpn-login.py, described here, and brought to my attention by sh4k3sph3r3. A CLI FirePass client is quite likely a better solution than separate browser instances, etc.

Preliminaries: Although the F5 FirePass SSL VPN product supports Linux, as best as I can tell, that support is somewhat limited: My understanding is that they officially claim support for 32-bit installs only, and they do not appear to track new distribution releases particularly aggressively. F5 has also been somewhat slow in supporting new browser versions: They announced support for Firefox 3 on October 6, 2008, nearly four months after its release and with only two months to go before Firefox 2 was end-of-lifed. For Firefox 3.6 support, a comment on the post linked above states that you need to request a special hot fix from F5 (which my site has not applied). There is no Google Chrome support that I am aware of.

Further, F5’s automated client installation tools have unfortunately never worked for me on Linux, even when the architecture and browser are in their support matrix. The manual download instruction links are also broken on the FirePass install I connect to.

Solution: Install a dedicated, 32-bit version of Firefox in a supported version; create a single-purpose Firefox profile for VPN use. Add the FirePass client to that browser and the operating system.
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