toasters November 1997

toasters@lists.teaparty.net

55 participants
56 discussions

backing up large filers
by matthew zeier 21 Nov '97

21 Nov '97

Has anyone found a "good" solution to backing up large filers? Someone convinced me that this ndmp thing was the way to go and I bought into the whole BudTool scheme (since they're the only ones supporting ndmp). I have an issue with that too - only one vendor. However, it's been nothing but a disaster and I'm looking for something far better. We've gotten the impression that no one at PDC has bothered to test BudTool with large filers with BreeceHill stackers (PDC and NetApp recommeneded these to us). There appears to be a general lack of interopibility. And finger pointing between Network Appliance and PDC. Right now we have an issue that keeps rebooting our filers every few days. Don't even talk about restoring data... as part of our general backup policy, we do periodic restores. I believe the wording from PDC was something to the effect that BudTool is a backup management software and not geared towards restores. Suffice it to say that we rarely have a successful restore. I'm basically fishing for alternative backup solutions. We have three F540s with ~100GB disk and about 20 other boxes with ~50GB or so each, all code development and all needs to be backed up. Any ideas? We're all pretty frustrated at the lack of a solid backup solution from Network Appliance. Hell, I'd go for something proprietary so long as it worked! - mz -- matthew zeier -- mrz(a)3com.com -- 3Com EWD Engineering -- 408/764-8420 ...................................................................... "Y el mundo se mueve, mas rapido y mejor." - Fey

3 2

F630 4.2a CIFS unable to access snapshots?
by Steve Losen 20 Nov '97

20 Nov '97

We have a F630 running 4.2a and are having trouble accessing snapshots with CIFS. Our snapshot schedule is hourlies every two hours, keep 8, and keep 7 nightlies, so we usually have 15 lying around. We use both NFS and CIFS, with unix style file protection semantics. >From NT and W95, you can get into a share and use it just fine. If you browse the ~snapshot dir, you see all the hourly.* and nightly.* entries, but if you click on any of them, you get an access denied error box. If you "dir" the snapshot directory you see all the hourly.* and nightly.* entries, but if you dir any of those, they are empty. The live directory has plenty of files in it and from NFS, you can access files in all the snapshots. Again, the live filesystem works just as you would expect. It's only the snapshots that are giving us trouble. By the way, I posted an earlier problem about the set-group bit and later realized that I was not a member of my test file's group, so of course I couldn't set the set-group bit - duh. Steve Losen scl(a)virginia.edu phone: 804-924-0640 University of Virginia ITC Unix Support

2 1

Re: Remote Backups
by mds46523＠ggr.co.uk 20 Nov '97

20 Nov '97

Could you put numbers to each of the quantities you enumerate? On Nov 20, 18:29, Scott MacDonald wrote: > Subject: Remote Backups > Toasties, > > Anyone any experiences of backing up one Filer to a remote tape > (DLT) on another Filer? We're doing some testing now, and found > that remote dumps are consistently three times slower than a local > dump (restores too). Is this normal? We're also seeing about half as > many packets coming back to the source Filer, is this really all > protocol overhead? No-one else apart from me is using these Filers, > and we're nowhere near capacity in terms of CPU, Network, Disk, or > Tape I/O. > Anyone got any experiences they can share? > > Many Thanks, > > Scott. > -- > _______________________________________________________________ > > Scott MacDonald Mobile Systems International Plc > Tel: 0171 971 8798 > System Administrator Fax: 0171 971 8712 > E-Mail: scott(a)msi-uk.com > _______________________________________________________________ >-- End of excerpt from Scott MacDonald -- -Mark, TSG Unix admin and support, int 782 4412, ext +44 1438 76 4412. ... an Englishman in London ...

1 0

Remote Backups
by Scott MacDonald 20 Nov '97

20 Nov '97

Toasties, Anyone any experiences of backing up one Filer to a remote tape (DLT) on another Filer? We're doing some testing now, and found that remote dumps are consistently three times slower than a local dump (restores too). Is this normal? We're also seeing about half as many packets coming back to the source Filer, is this really all protocol overhead? No-one else apart from me is using these Filers, and we're nowhere near capacity in terms of CPU, Network, Disk, or Tape I/O. Anyone got any experiences they can share? Many Thanks, Scott. -- _______________________________________________________________ Scott MacDonald Mobile Systems International Plc Tel: 0171 971 8798 System Administrator Fax: 0171 971 8712 E-Mail: scott(a)msi-uk.com _______________________________________________________________

2 1

locking problems?
by Alexei Rodriguez 20 Nov '97

20 Nov '97

Has anybody run into locking issues with their filers? Basically, we are seeing the following problems: - Sun Solaris 2.5.1 client tries to lock a file - the lock succeeds (it is the only client/process trying to get the the lock) - the process completes and attempts to release the lock - the process hangs because the kernel never clears the lock Our filer (f540, 8MB write cache, 256MB read) is running DataONTAP 4.2a. We are using NFS v3 over udp. hard mounts, noint. So, has anybody seen something like this? The common thread that all the processes have is that they are all perl scripts. I am looking at SunSolve for clues. Seems there have been some patches that touch on the locking. We will be testing these over the next few days. Oh, and all the lock problems started when we went from 4.01c to 4.2a. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. Alexei

1 0

Pre-purchase Contemplations...
by Marc Powell 20 Nov '97

20 Nov '97

Greetings everyone. We are very seriously considering the purchase of either 1 F520 or 2-3 F230's to serve as customer FTP/web/mail storage. We are an ISP with approximately 2000+ customers and we expect that to grow significantly in the coming year. There are a couple of things we would like to toss out there and see what people with experience with the boxes have to say. First, and this just came up, let's say you have a F520 with redundant power per shelf. Does that mean that you only have a total of 28 bays for drives? Second, what would you all say the pros and cons of using a single F520 over several F230's would be, and vice-versa, and are the boxes really as reliable as the hype? Third, is anyone aware of any plans to develop multiple file system support into the Filers? Lastly, are there any development plans to incorporate fail-over support like that in the F630 into the F520? -- Marc Powell Systems Administrator

2 1

RE: links using CIFS
by Matt Lewin 19 Nov '97

19 Nov '97

Relative links will mostly work, it is just that ./ and ../ links are suppressed. The idea is to avoid cycles which Windows will not recognize are happening. So for example, if I did mlewin:/u/mlewin/html $ ln -s ../images images will not work because there exists a possibility that in /u/mlewin/images I may have done mlewin:/u/mlewin/images $ ln -s ../html html which will create a nasty cycle as Windows recursively descends through \\filer\mlewin\html \\filer\mlewin\html\images \\filer\mlewin\html\images\html \\filer\mlewin\html\images\html\images . . . This occurs because UNIX directory links appear as directories to a CIFS client. Basically, I personally do stuff like: mlewin:/u/mlewin $ ln -s mlewincvs/internal_homepage web mlewin:/u/mlewin $ ln -s web html so that people can get to .../~mlewin/ from our internal web site, and I can still get to my personally controlled web pages from CIFS without having to remember if I am supposed to go to "web" or "html" Absolute links will only work if somebody has setup /etc/symlink.translations with some directive like Map /u/path/dir/file /filer/dir/path Unfortunately, that is as much as I know about the way that absolute links work. I will see what else I can find out. On Tuesday, November 18, 1997 3:01 PM, Daniel Quinlan [SMTP:quinlan@transmeta.com] wrote: > Could someone explain exactly what works and what doesn't when using > symbolic links from a CIFS client (Windows95 or WindowsNT, primarily) > from a Netapp with Unix symbolic links? > > Thanks. > > - Dan

2 1

links using CIFS
by Daniel Quinlan 19 Nov '97

19 Nov '97

Could someone explain exactly what works and what doesn't when using symbolic links from a CIFS client (Windows95 or WindowsNT, primarily) from a Netapp with Unix symbolic links? Thanks. - Dan

3 2

Re: soft quotas
by mds46523＠ggr.co.uk 18 Nov '97

18 Nov '97

On Nov 15, 17:16, Brian Tao wrote: > Subject: Re: soft quotas > On Wed, 12 Nov 1997, Guy Harris wrote: > > > > If that's acceptable to everyone, we can put that on the schedule; > > there's no technical problem with providing soft quotas compatible > > with those you get from a SunOS 4.x or 5.x *NFS server* when a > > *client* goes over the soft quota. > > I think we need to at least get some of the basic server-side > requirements first: > > 1. Two limits for each quota type (including qtrees) > 2. A grace period after which a soft quota becomes a hard quota > 3. Mechanism to report quota information to a user-level process on > an NFS client (e.g., rpc.rquotad) > > Notifying the user in real time, as writes are performed to exceed > a soft quota, is probably not worth pursuing at this time. Client-side > processes can be developed to handle the reporting and enforcing of > local policy. The filer shouldn't go out of its way to actively warn > the user... if your users don't read their .login warning messages or > their warning e-mail, that's their problem. Having the server somehow > outputting a human-readable message to the associated tty seems rather > messy and icky. Not to mention that the protocol probably doesn't have this feature already else I imagine the R&D guys at NetApp would've included something to use it already 8) I don't like the idea of extending the protocol unless it's through a standards type process, with >1 vendor involved. > > The filer will have to track each individual quota setting, > incrementing and resetting grace timers as appropriate. When a grace > period expires, the soft quota becomes a hard quota, and the NFS > client will get EDQUOT's on writes. That's the only real-time > notification I'm looking for. > > Soft quotas on a quota tree could have some interesting effects. > Doing a 'df' on an NFS filesystem would show the hard quota as the > total fs size, while the "Used" and "Available" numbers would add up > to the soft quota size. The difference between the soft and hard > quotas can then be treated like the minfree threshold of a UFS > filesystem, except you don't have to be root to exceed the soft quota. Yah, Dave Hitz and I had a quick email dialogue where I kinda explained how we (ab)use qtree's here, and how the qtree quota would, for us, be best treated as an entirely different beast. We use qtree's to split up the reservoir of disk space in a filer so that a variety of projects can use network-mounted space but stay easy-to-administer. Lots'o users live in each qtree but you'd want user quotas to apply as well as the qtree quota. The qtree quota, as I see things, has no benefit to acrue from having soft limits - running out of quota in a qtree looks like you've just run right out of disk to a client and folk have learnt to handle that themselves. > -- > Brian Tao (BT300, taob(a)netcom.ca) > "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't" >-- End of excerpt from Brian Tao -- -Mark, TSG Unix admin and support, int 782 4412, ext +44 1438 76 4412. ... an Englishman in London ...

2 1

filers & netnews
by strata＠virtual.net 17 Nov '97

17 Nov '97

Hi fellow filerophiles, I'm trying to gather some working metrics on netnews and filers. I'm told by the folks at HighWind that Cyclone and Typhoon work well with filers, as they care about spool objects and don't care where those spool objects might be. There's always the INN approach, with a master write host and some subsidiary nnrpd hosts mounting the spool dirs read only. Karl Swarz "Brave Little Toaster Meets Usenet" article is the only source of hard metrics I have, and those are primarily benchmark type metrics rather than production environment metrics. Send me your stories of your environment and I'll summarize to the list. I'm looking for: - description of filer (model, os rev, storage, any other workload) - hosts that are moving the netnews (how many per filer, rw vs ro) - software (INN vs HighWind vs homebrew, number of nnrpd's per host) - users (number of real users, simultaneous users, how user population maps to nnrpd or equivalent (eg 4 users per nnrpd, 10 users, where does performance degrade)). I'm exploring the most cost effective way to build a large news server farm, and I will post my findings on the web and send in the URL with the toaster summaries. Pointers to similar work appreciated also! Cheers, _Strata ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Strata Rose (strata(a)virtual.net) 408-534-3714 VirtualNet Consulting http://www.virtual.net/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------

2 1

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

toasters November 1997