toasters November 1998

toasters@lists.teaparty.net

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70 discussions

Max Number of drives
by Jason Middlebrooks 12 Nov '98

12 Nov '98

What is the max number of 4 Gig drives a F210 can have? What is the max number of 4 Gig drives a F330 can have? Jason Middlebrooks Systems Engineer Direct Connect Systems Phone: 770-933-9327x260 2264 Northwest Parkway, Suite I Pager: 888-502-1625 Marietta, GA 30067 Fax: 770-933-9272

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Re: Potential user has questions
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 12 Nov '98

12 Nov '98

On 11/09/98 18:40:33 you wrote: > > >On Mon, 09 Nov 1998 13:25:57 PST, > Sam Schorr <sschorr(a)homestead.com> wrote: > >> I think the reasoning here is not quite thorough enough. If I buy a Compaq >> server and then I install a 3-Com ethernet card, I still expect, and get, >> full support from Compaq. This has been the case in the clone, or Intel >> world for quite awhile. I know that it is less true the more proprietary >> you get, but still is essentially the case, even in the IBM mainframe world >> and in the UNIX world. I am now in the middle of an issue between Network >> Appliance and Microsoft and I would NEVER buy another filer if NetApp tried >> to deflect response to the fact that I use Microsoft products and therefore >> I should debug the Microsoft side first. Whether I like it or not, and >> whether NetApp likes it or not, multi-vendor environments MUST be supported >> - there is no option. > > >I agree, in general. > >I think netapp's position is somewhat justified, because they can >claim -- and I take it on face value -- that they stress disks more >than other vendors. Therefore, they claim, they have to test each >model disk and even each firmware revision before quality assuring >it. In theory, any generic disk should work, but there's enough >"practice" out there to show that different disks stand up to various >stresses differently. > >I can accept this, but I'm not sure why this also applies to memory. >And I guess I can accept it with scsi boards and ethernet boards, but >I'm not entirely happy about it. It seems to me they could QA more >add-ons than the ones they sell. Actually, my impression (I have no data to back this up) is that the memory failures are roughly as likely as the disk failures, and they weed out a lot of memory in their testing as well. This is because they stress the memory as much as the disk (for the most part a lot of the memory acts as one big RAM disk), and memory timing issues need to be very, very tight. SCSI and ethernet boards similarly have to be qualified. I agree more could be done, but there would be a tangible performance loss for running a 3com card in your filer instead. And Netapp would have to develop a driver for it and it's multiple incarnations. There isn't a nice driver interface layer you can use to make the driver standard across different platforms that you can also use for Netapp, because then you'd lose even more performance. On a final note, you're not the only one I've seen doubt Netapp's "claim" of testing. I don't know why people doubt this. Trust me, I've seen it. You can probably call them up and ask to see it, too. There's a lot of QA that goes on. Bruce

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Re: Max Number of drives
by Paul Albers 12 Nov '98

12 Nov '98

Jason, The F210 can have two Fast/Wide SCSI shelves with a maximum of 14 4 GB drives. The F330 can have four Fast Narrow SCSI shelves with a maximum of 28 4GB drives. If you are calculating the total space, remember that one drive will be the parity drive and you will probably have one spare. Also, take into consideration the amount of space you will reserve for snapshots. The big thing is to make sure to take off 10% of the total up front. Here is an example: 14 4GB drives, parity and one spare 14 x 4 x 90% = 50.4GB 20% snap reserve 50.4 x 80% = 40.32GB So with two full shelves ( 14 4GB drives ) on the F210, you will have a total of about 40GB for your active file system. You can increase this by decreasing the amount set aside for the snap reserve. Hope this helps, -paul At 10:05 AM 11/12/98 -0500, you wrote: >What is the max number of 4 Gig drives a F210 can have? > >What is the max number of 4 Gig drives a F330 can have? > >Jason Middlebrooks Systems Engineer >Direct Connect Systems Phone: 770-933-9327x260 >2264 Northwest Parkway, Suite I Pager: 888-502-1625 >Marietta, GA 30067 Fax: 770-933-9272 > >

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subscribe
by Marcel Beelen 11 Nov '98

11 Nov '98

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SNMP and NetApps
by Huba Leidenfrost 10 Nov '98

10 Nov '98

One of the Network Appliance support critters pointed me to this email address. I assume it is a list. If so would someone please point me to the web archives or subscription mechanism. Thanks, H u b a -- --- O HUBA LEIDENFROST Network Systems Analyst -- <^- huba(a)uidaho.edu U of Idaho ITS: Networks & Systems -- -\/\ http://www.uidaho.edu/~huba --- \ TEL: 208.885.6721 FAX: 208.885.7539

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Re: Potential user has questions
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 10 Nov '98

10 Nov '98

>Actually, the only NFS service that involves passwords is PCNFSD. And these passwords are encrypted, marginally, so an average sniffer won't see it (they are usually looking for password in unecrypted telnet/rlogin sessions) and would have to be coded to specifically look for and recover these passwords. Bruce

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disk firmware versions required for 5.1.2
by Daniel Quinlan 10 Nov '98

10 Nov '98

Can someone at NetApp tell me the firmware version required to run 5.1.2 before I upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1.2? I would like to know how much time I need to schedule for the upgrade. (It looks like it would also save me that first reboot, meaning less overall downtime.) This information should really be included with the upgrade notes. I would like to know this for the following systems and disks: F630 SCSI : ST19171W and ST39173WC F630 FC : ST19171FC F540 : ST15150W F330 : ST15230N (It actually looks like I might only need to know about the F630 FC, since it's the only firmware included with 5.1.2. The notes indicate that you end up with version FB37 after an upgrade, so maybe I have to upgrade if I don't have that, but maybe not. Anyway, I'd rather work in the light.) Thanks. - Dan

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Re: nfs (in)security?
by Tom Reingold 10 Nov '98

10 Nov '98

On Tue, 10 Nov 1998 00:07:20 EST, Brian Atkins <brian(a)posthuman.com> wrote: > This does not make a lot of sense to me.. I mean, if some user > on the client has hacked root, then game over man. Who cares > past that. Of course they can su to some user and mess with > their files, root can do just about anything. > > What I want and need to know when designing our nfs system is > whether a normal non-root user, _without hacking root_, can > do any shenanigans via or to nfs. Basically, is adding properly > configured nfs to an already secure system going to be ok > or not ok, and if not ok what can be done about it? I think the premise you offer isn't worth taking as a "given." You can't assume people won't hack root. It's too easy. It's easy not because you run your UNIX systems so badly -- for I have no idea -- but because it's probably easy to drop a Linux system on the wire. Or someone can some evil DNS packet injection. Or someone can write some funnky NFS code on a PC to spoof UIDs etc. Unfortunately, I think all this means you can have NFS or security but you can't have both. Or maybe a better conclusion is that this state of affairs is acceptable, but we should not consider it air-tight, even with the best of our efforts. -- Tom Reingold tommy(a)bell-labs.com http://www.bell-labs.com/~tommy Bell Labs, the Research and Development unit of Lucent Technologies Murray Hill, NJ, 07974-0636 US

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Re: nfs (in)security?
by mds＠ns.gbnet.net 10 Nov '98

10 Nov '98

If you don't force the filer to only allow root to mount areas onto clients (ie force such traffic to come from ports upto 1024, ports which Unix only allows root to bind to normally) then it is possible for a user to write an rpc program to fake NFS traffic. I once saw this demonstrated in college. However, that task is beyond most script-kiddies. For all I know there's now a standard tool though. Most people don't make their NFS servers so trusting. It's not insanely hard to break NFS 'security' though, all you need is to pretend to be a trusted host, say the adminhost, convincingly enough and long enough and you're away. I had great hopes for kerberos enabled NFS at the introductionof NFS3 but that all seems to have died a death, as has using Kerberos in the Windows environment. Everyone I talk to now seems to be talking 'certificates' - as if the rest of kerberos has no value. *sigh*

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Re: Potential user has questions
by Brian Atkins 10 Nov '98

10 Nov '98

"Yoder, Alan" wrote: > > > Right, of course if you misconfig something you open yourself > > to mischief. What I want to get at is whether it is safe to > > have a filer attached to the net-at-large, or whether it needs > > to be firewalled or otherwise protected. Can you elaborate on > > the nfs insecurities you mention? > > A number of NFS systems and tools send passwords in plain text, > and the filer is not an exception. Use a firewall or switched > Ethernet. That bites > > > > > What kind of real-world bandwidth can it put out (F740) ? I > > > > see the transaction specs, but what about sustained mbits > > > > in a web-type environment (3x more reads than writes)? > > > > > > Netapp prefers to measure "response time" vs. "transactions/sec". > > > In other words, a filer might be showing tremendous throughput > > > for one party, while starving out the others (delayed responses). > > > In the real world, you want average response time to be as fast as > > > possible because that is what people notice. Netapp has very > > > impressive throughput and average response time does not degrade > > > dramatically at high loads. > > > > Excellent, but is the filer capable of overloading 100mbit > > ethernet? If so, just how much bandwidth should we spec out > > for it so that it can perform to its max abilities? > > As I remember it, the 740 can saturate at least two 100Mb Ethernet > links. In house, we have our main filers connected via > gigabit uplinks to a backbone, which gets switched down to > 100Mb LANs from there. > > Keep in mind, you need a lot of clients to saturate the filer. > It takes around 50 200MHz PC clients running NetBench to max > it out. A web server with a filer back end won't even make > it sweat, and one 100Mb Ethernet card might be enough. What > kind of uplink to the world will the web server have? > The whole system will be colocated at a facility with multiple OC-3/DS3/T1 links. Same place amazon.com is located at... It will only have about 10 300mhz PII client boxes at first, so this is sounding good. I think we may go with the Cisco FEC multiple 100mbit links instead of gigabit in order to provide some link redundancy. -- The future has arrived; it's just not evenly distributed. -William Gibson ______________________________________________________________________ Visit Hypermart at http://www.hypermart.net for free business hosting!

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toasters November 1998