toasters April 1997

toasters@lists.teaparty.net

22 participants
20 discussions

toaster testing.
by Michael Salmon 29 Apr '97

29 Apr '97

We are about to loan a toaster to see how well it performs in our environment (mixed Sun/Auspex/pc, NFS/SMB, ATM(Fore)/Ethernet). Does anyone have any tips about toaster weaknesses that we should try? We aren't trying to run down NAC, all systems have weaknesses, it's the one that you don't know about that are troublesome. /Michael -- /--------------------------------\ ___ | Michael Salmon | / \ | Ericsson Utveckling AB | / | | ÄS/UAB/Z/IPE | / _| | Box 1505 | / | | 125 25 Älvsjö | / / | Sweden | / / | | | | +--------------------------------+ | \ | Michael.Salmon(a)uab.ericsson.se | / *| | | / _/ | Tel: +46 8 727 30 74 | | | | FAX: +46 8 647 82 76 | | / # | GSM: +46 705 902 842 | | __// \--------------------------------/ |_/ "*Real* wizards don't whine about how they paid their dues." -- Quentin Johnson (quent(a)atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu)

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ATM NIC Compatibility
by John F. Kane 23 Apr '97

23 Apr '97

We are planning an ATM backbone for our network. What ATM Network Interface Cards are compatible with the F330s? Thanks. John F. Kane The MITRE Corporation

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ATM NIC Compatibility
by John F. Kane 22 Apr '97

22 Apr '97

What ATM Network Interface Cards are compatible with the F330s? -- John F. Kane Lead Staff, G052 The MITRE Corporation

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Re: 9Gb discs for F330s
by Steve Gremban 22 Apr '97

22 Apr '97

Are there any issues we should know about mixing different sized disks on the same system? I know it will work but is it something I should avoid? regards, Steve Gremban gremban(a)ti.com ------------- Begin Forwarded Message ------------- >this is great, and many thanks, but as someone who has only two slots left >in the third shelf of each of his F330s, and will need to know what to buy >shortly, could you give some indication of the timescale for the official >announcement? > >thanks. > > Tom Yates - Unix Chap - The Mathworks, Inc. - +1 (508) 647 7561 ------------- End Forwarded Message -------------

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Re: 9Gb discs for F330s
by cheena＠netapp.com 21 Apr '97

21 Apr '97

Since I happen to be an official spokesperson for product related issues, I'll defer product details and schedules until the forthcoming announcement. NetApp expects to support 9 GB disks on all our current filers: NetApp F220, F330 and F540. Configuration details will be provided at product introduction time. Cheena

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9Gb discs for F330s
by Tom Yates 21 Apr '97

21 Apr '97

would anyone care to comment on when we might expect to see 9Gb discs approved and available for the F330, and whether different shelves will be required? Tom Yates - Unix Chap - The Mathworks, Inc. - +1 (508) 647 7561 MAG#65061 DoD#0135 AMA#461546 1024/CFDFDE39 0C E7 46 60 BB 96 87 05 04 BD FB F8 BB 20 C1 8C "Microsoft (tm) is a single-sofa supplier"

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NetApp reports
by Christoph Doerbeck 18 Apr '97

18 Apr '97

Greetings, I've recently been approached by management and asked to produce some weekly/monthly reports on our F330's. Do you have any suggestions on which technique provides the best reports? Are there pubically available scripts you might recommend? ++-------------------------------------- Christoph Doerbeck Motorola ISG / DIS Mansfield, MA. USA (###) ###-#### doerbeck(a)dma.isg.mot.com ++--------------------------------------

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Reporting Statistics on NetApp's
by Christoph Doerbeck 17 Apr '97

17 Apr '97

>> I've recently been approached by management and asked to produce >> some weekly/monthly reports on our F330's. Do you have any suggestions >> on which technique provides the best reports? Are there pubically >> available scripts you might recommend? >not to sound facile, but what sort of reports? disc-usage related? >network related? load related? availability related? I apologize for the lack of detail. Our admin who had been in charge of our NetApps has recently left, and now the maintenance of these systems has fallen into my hands. The reports I've been asked to generate focus mainly on who/what users are consuming most of the space. We would also like to chart growth in order to predict expansion needs. These items are not very technical, but given the added overhead of NFS and the .snapshots, I was just curious to know how others monitor their Network Appliances. Are there any cool tricks? I guess that means "disc-usage related"... ++-------------------------------------- Christoph Doerbeck Motorola ISG / DIS Mansfield, MA. USA doerbeck(a)dma.isg.mot.com ++--------------------------------------

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F540 crashes while unlinking many files, Assertion failure?
by Ragnar Lonn 17 Apr '97

17 Apr '97

Hello, I have a Netapp F540 that has some 2-3 million files on its filesystem currently. I've been testing a news server setup on it and now I'd like to erase all these files, starting all over again with an empty filesystem. I did "rm -rf <dir>" (and no, I didn't erase the /etc dir on the Netapp) and it ran for a while, erasing lots of files, then the Netapp crashed and rebooted! I hoped it was a freak occurance so I did another rm when it got back up again but that made it crash once more. Now, I'm thinking this may have something to do with the snapshots. Because this is a newsserver I used "options nosnap on" following advice I got from people at Netapp. I also tried enabling snapshots and doing "snap sched 0 0 3@1,9,17" (just to test if it would make a difference) but the machine still was still prone to crash. I know the snapshot reserve may be too small - can that cause the server to crash like this? Yesterday I started an rm job and the F540 crashed at 2am this morning with the following message: PANIC: ../common/wafl/write_alloc.c:770: Assertion failure. version: NetApp Release 4.0.1c: Wed Jan 8 05:53:54 PST 1997 cc flags: 1 .dumping core: ........................................done ...it rebooted and ran until, I think, 4 am when it gave the same message but this time it didn't go online again because an old core file was present apparently: .Old core present on disk --- not dumped. This time it just halted. I think I read somewhere about this write_alloc.c:770: Assertion failure message/bug/whatever but I can't remember where. Can I just tell the Netapp to reboot again from the "ok" prompt or should I do something else? How do I make the machine *not* crash when erasing lots of files? Also, is there some way to re-initialize a Netapp server to the state it was when shipped? Doing a separate unlink on each file when you have several million files can be very time-consuming even if the server doesn't crash ;-) Regards, /Ragnar, Algonet

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Re: Mail Strategy
by Dave Pascoe 10 Apr '97

10 Apr '97

On Wed, 9 Apr 1997, Tom Yates wrote: >we just moved /var/spool/mail from an Ultra-2 to the toasters. i wouldn't >say it has been completely painless by any means, though from some angles >it's been a win... dave, you want to comment further? I do have a few thoughts and observations: 1) Writing to /var/spool/mail via the F330 (NFS) was a win for us in this case, especially once we increased NVRAM from 2MB -> 4MB. This particular F330 is used for other (general) access, not just for mbox duty. Observations lately point to the need for more NVRAM at peak times, so we're going to 8MB shortly. The box gets really humped when it's stuck in constant physical disk writes. The old situation was a Fast-Wide SCSI disk attached directly to the UltraSPARC 1. That disk was doing way too much. 2) One of the reasons for migrating to the Toaster was to eliminate our mailhost from exporting /var/spool/mail. This enabled us to be able to do work on the mailhost/newshost without being too disruptive. The Toasters have to always be up anyway or all UNIX boxes hang. Our current thinking is that we might do well to go to a SPARCstorage array locally attached to the mailhost and *not* exporting /var/spool/mail at all, and forcing the use of POP3/IMAP. Those people using Elm will just have to use Pine. No big loss...in fact, a big gain. But making users change email software can be a pain, especially for the zealots who insist on performing every single action from within Emacs. Don't get me wrong, I love Emacs. But sometimes you gotta draw the line. 3) If you use POP3 you will be incredibly unhappy at times, especially if even a few users have large mailboxes. This is due to the way most stock poppers do mailbox locking. (write temp file called .user.pop and then write this file out again as user) Our current approach is to set a reasonable threshold on user mailbox sizes and email users informing them to check their mail settings and clean up. There are many variables here that relate mostly to POP settings in the client programs. 4) IMAP4 is pretty good. Use it if you can. It also solves a lot of the issues with being a mobile user. IMAP4 is better than POP3 in this respect. More like a true client-server mail package with all the benefits of having source code and not needing to open shrink-wrap. -- Dave Pascoe | mailto:dave@mathworks.com | Voice: 508.647.7362 KM3T | http://www.mathworks.com | FAX: 508.647.7002 PGP fingerprint: 53 AD 71 88 2F AA 45 AC D0 2E 68 91 71 77 39 AF

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toasters April 1997