Cloud Storage (Warning...Gratuitous ad)

Forgive me for the gratuitous advertisement but I am a fan of cloud storage.  It's still in it's infancy but the way technology changes these days the sky's the limit, and we haven't seen anything yet.

Anyway, I'm extremely paranoid by nature so I won't store anything in the cloud unless it's pre-encrypted.  As much as I love the concept I still just don't feel comfortable storing stuff on these sites.  As a result I use SkyCrypt and BoxCryptor to pre-encrypt everything that goes to the cloud.

One thing I found that's pretty slick is a service that can link cloud services called "MultCloud".  It allows you to move files between cloud services.  They have a deal going right now where if I post a blurb about their service I can get my account bumped up to 10 Terabytes of cross-traffic.  What the heck, I can use the bandwidth so here goes.

MultCloud(https://www.multcloud.com/), a FREE and easy-to-use web app, supports for Managing Files and Transferring Files across Cloud Drives. Free provide 10TB traffic for data transmission.

Again, sorry for the gratuitous ad but a 10 Terabyte upgrade was too much to pass up...  :-)

How to grow the disk on the Cisco FirePower VM Appliance

I had to expand the disk on our Cisco FirePower appliance today to accommodate additional logging.  Initially I had a lot of trouble getting things to cooperate.  It took some time and searching Google to identify why I was having issues.  The answers were contained within about 4 different posts I located.

This appliance starts life as an OVF file that you download and deploy.  It's based on a heavily modified version of Redhat Linux. As a result these steps would apply to any Linux extended partition.

The logs are stored under the /var folder which is mounted from SDA7.  SDA7 is the third partition contained withing an extended partition.

The solution is fairly simple using a GParted live CD image so I figured I'd post it.

The process is as follows:

1. Gracefully shut down the appliance.
2. Snapshot it "just in case".
3. Edit the VM settings to add a CD drive and force BIOS at next boot.  Extend the disk to whatever size is required at this time.
4. Mount the GParted ISO image or CD depending on what you have.
5. Boot the VM and edit the BIOS boot options to boot from CD first.  
6. Save and reboot.
7. The VM should now boot into the Live GParted CD.
8. Load the partition editor.  You should see the single large disk and three partitions, twp primary and one extended which contains three partitions.
9. Select the large partition within the extended partition.  This "should" be SDA7 but this may vary.
10. SHRINK this partition by around one gigabyte.  More or less is fine.  (Note that this can take a LONG time.  On our fast systems it tool 2 hours.)
11. Once completed MOVE the now smaller partition to the far right edge of the extended partition.
12. Once complete MOVE both remaining partitions to the right.  You may need to reboot before these will let you move them.
13. When all partitions have been move to the right you should be able to extend the container partition all the way out to the right.  Seems there must be a small amount of space to the far left before you can extend it.
14. Now that the extended partition is fully expanded you can expand SDA7 to fill the remaining space.
15. Reboot back into the OS and verify that things still work.

I followed these steps and everything went very smoothly.  

A few things to note.  You will get errors during the moves about kernel notifications.  Just ignore these.  Also if things start failing you may need to reboot between steps.  I also saw posts discussing the fact that should the Linux swap partition get mounted you won't be able to edit anything.  The live CD doesn't use the swap on the disks so it "should" just work.  If for some reason the swap partition does get mounted you can dismount it from within GParted.

Thats it.  Hope this helps someone else save some time.