Found a weekend after the new moon to go out and shoot the Milky Way. Figured this would be my last trip out for the year until I had to wait until next year to do it again. It was a clear night and the Milky Way was beautiful in the sky. I was surprised to see the number of people that were out there also doing photography. I am pretty happy with how the shots came out, the only issue being Palm Springs in the distance and that everything was sitting on top of that glow. I might try to do a light filter next year.
Hummingbirds
Last of the shots from the hummingbirds in my backyard from the last week. I decided to get rid of my feeder as I just can’t see feeding non hummingbirds and they were consuming most of the feeder. The poor hummingbirds were not able to get to anything. It was fine while it lasted, may be I will do it again next year.
Corsair F4U-1A
Planes of Fame flew their Corsair F4U-1A over a couple of days last week. It was nice to see the plane up in the air, took some pictures of it and then edited them in Lightroom. Still out practicing getting ready for the first airshows of the season that will be coming up soon. Rally excited for Airshows to be happening again and looking forward to being out seeing the planes fly.
Bolsa Chica Reserve shooting using Topaz Denoise
Was out at the Bolsa Chica Reserver a couple of weeks ago. Early morning shooting and a cloud cover required a high ISO. I took the shots into Topaz Denise to clean up the images. Pretty happy with the results, one of these days though I will make it out and it won’t be overcast.
Additional Astrophotography in Joshua Tree
Went back over the 4th of July weekend to take some shots. Unfortunately the cloud cover caused the shots to not be perfect. However I think there are some good ones that I was fairly happy with it. I did some additional edits to them to make them look a little better and take out some of the highlights and fix some of the issues that I did see in them. All shot with the my Sony A7Riv and the 16-35 F4 lens.
Topaz Denoise AI is wonderful
On a chance I purchased the Topaz Denoise plugin for Lightroom. I have to say I am very happy with what it has done so far for me. I was out shooting this weekend in low light at the Bolsa Chica Reserve. It meant I was going to have some high iso shots so I am really looking forward to going through and fixing some of these shots and making them look even better. Here’s an example of an ISO 10000 shot that I did, the original isn’t bad, but it is noisy. I ran it through Topaz and chose the clear option and it looks so much better.
Goose in flight
Goose taking off from the Santa Ana River outside of the park in Yorba Linda.
Joshua Tree Astrophotography
I signed up for a class at Samy’s camera to go out and do Astrophotography. I drove down and met up with everyone at Joshua Tree on a Saturday night and we shot until the wee hours of the morning. It was interesting to do some different type of photography and to get some what I thought were good shots of the Milky Way Galaxy. These shots were at 20s, 6400ISO 16mm with the Sony A7Riv and the 16-35 F4 lens. I think took them into Lightroom and only did some edits with cropping, but left the photo mostly as is.
P-38 Lightning flying
The Planes of Fame P-38 lightning was up in the air over the weekend and I was able to go out and get some shots of it. I played around with the shots in Lightroom and also played with the super resolution features that are in Lightroom right now, pretty happy with what I got out of it and like the shots. Need to continue working on my panning and also didn’t get some shots as the pilot was doing some acrobatics and need to work on that. All shot with the Sony A9ii and the Sony 100-400.
Check your Raid: Cisco ASA and Sourcefire
Over the past week I had an issue where one of my Cisco 5545 with a Sourcefire module went down and failed and I couldn’t get it restarted. When I looked at the console for the SFR Module I saw disk errors and I opened a ticket with Cisco to have them look at it. One thing that I found appalling was the quality of Cisco TAC engineers has dropped dramatically. I spent more time on the phone with these guys not knowing what to do and and my showing them commands that I had just googled and what needed to be done. If these guys are supposed to be the experts in the device and technology I am not impressed. Especially since Cisco keeps raising my rates and the quality seems to get lower rather than better.
Back to the issue:
The Cisco 5545 Sourcefire unit has two SSDs in a Raid 1 configuration, so you would think that if one failed the other would take over. At least that is what I thought, however it turns out that both of the SSDs had failed and there was no notification at all on the unit itself or in the logs as to one of the units being bad, let alone both of them. The only place I found it was running the “sh raid” command on the terminal. After seeing the failure of this unit, I then went through the rest of my 5545s with Sourcefire modules and found two others that had a failed drive and there was no warning, no error lights on the drive or the firewall itself. I had to run the command to find the issue.
Here is what a healthy raid set looks like:
/dev/md0:
Version : 1.2
Creation Time : Fri Feb 19 18:27:16 2021
Raid Level : raid1
Array Size : 124969216 (119.18 GiB 127.97 GB)
Used Dev Size : 124969216 (119.18 GiB 127.97 GB)
Raid Devices : 2
Total Devices : 2
Persistence : Superblock is persistent
Intent Bitmap : Internal
Update Time : Wed Jun 2 20:05:01 2021
State : clean
Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 2
Failed Devices : 0
Spare Devices : 0
Name : ciscoasa:0 (local to host ciscoasa)
UUID : 244baa9a:b6e40506:f7384510:fcb42706
Events : 12123
Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 8 0 0 active sync /dev/sda
2 8 16 1 active sync /dev/sdb
Here’s what an unhealthy raid set looks like:
/dev/md0:
Version : 1.2
Creation Time : Mon May 25 12:42:13 2020
Raid Level : raid1
Array Size : 124969216 (119.18 GiB 127.97 GB)
Used Dev Size : 124969216 (119.18 GiB 127.97 GB)
Raid Devices : 2
Total Devices : 2
Persistence : Superblock is persistent
Intent Bitmap : Internal
Update Time : Wed Jun 2 20:01:32 2021
State : clean, degraded
Active Devices : 1
Working Devices : 1
Failed Devices : 1
Spare Devices : 0
Name : ciscoasa:0 (local to host ciscoasa)
UUID : 0ed2ca7c:260897dd:f183f4bf:c0f15bfb
Events : 12258234
Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 8 0 0 active sync /dev/sda
2 0 0 2 removed
2 8 16 - faulty /dev/sdb
I can’t believe there is no logs or notifications, Solarwinds didn’t pick up the hardware issues. You would think there would be some sort of notification sent out or the HD light on the firewall would turn orange, what a novel concept to notify people of a failed hardware item before it causes major problems.
So if you run any of the modules in your ASA firewalls, make sure to check the raid level and that the drives are in a healthy state, if not get the ticket open with TAC. Where they can give you such brilliant ideas as move the faulty drive to another ASA, or swap the drives(which causes the firewall to crash, so don’t do it).
Joseph Jenkins 