toasters February 1998

toasters@lists.teaparty.net

47 participants
41 discussions

More about CIFS
by Alexei Rodriguez 20 Feb '98

20 Feb '98

There is an article (very timely) in the latest SysAdmin magazine by Bridget Allison (NetApp employee) titled: "integrating CIFS and NFS file sharing". >From it, here is the location for CIFS info: http://www.microsoft.com/intdev/cifs for those interested. Alexei

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Gigabit ethernet
by Alexei Rodriguez 20 Feb '98

20 Feb '98

How many of you are testing or using gigabit on the filer? I have some friends that have been doing it, but only 66% success. The 1 person using the Alteon (or whatever the NetApp reccomended one is) got good results; but the density is lacking. Another person is using a Foundry switch between a filer (630) and a DEC alphastation. He is getting decent results. But the Foundry equipment is also less than dense (and will be expensive when they put the chassis systems out). Finally, another friend is using a Prominet Cajun switch (good density, excellent price) but cannot get the filer to "ring up" on the switch. Looks like it might be a Prominet issue. Has anyone tried other equipment? Cisco (beta tesing)? YAGO? Success stories? Horror stories? I need to go from FDDI to something faster (and less expensive). ATM is not it.. :) My plan is to put the filers on gigabit, as well as our backups machine and the heavy use clients (servers). The rest of the servers can use switched 100mbit. Thanks. Alexei

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Re: Gigabit ethernet
by Johannes Erdfelt 20 Feb '98

20 Feb '98

On Thu, Feb 19, 1998, Alexei Rodriguez <alexei(a)cimedia.com> wrote: > > How many of you are testing or using gigabit on the filer? > I have some friends that have been doing it, but only 66% > success. > > The 1 person using the Alteon (or whatever the NetApp reccomended one is) > got good results; but the density is lacking. The Alteon NIC's (the ones NetApp sells and supports) work great with the Alteon switch (surprise!). I was supposed to have a meeting with a sales person this week but something came up and he had to cancel. They hinted at some sort of chassis solution in the future (as is everyone else). > Another person is using a Foundry switch between a filer (630) and > a DEC alphastation. He is getting decent results. But the > Foundry equipment is also less than dense (and will be expensive > when they put the chassis systems out). I wonder who that could be :) The chassis will indeed be expensive, but relative to the other chassis solutions will be very competetive as well as denser and featureful. I am anxiously awaiting it now. > Finally, another friend is using a Prominet Cajun switch > (good density, excellent price) but cannot get the filer to > "ring up" on the switch. Looks like it might be a Prominet > issue. It's probably a link negotiation problem. I haven't been able to get the Alteon NIC to negotiate with any switch. I dunno if Gigabit ethernet Link Negotiation is going to be as horrible as 10/100 Link Negotiation. Since my test NetApp isn't available to me right now, this is from memory: filer> rc_toggle_basic filer*> LinkNegotiation e10 0 filer*> rc_toggle_basic filer> That will turn it off the Link Negotiation and the NIC should immediately start working. We needed to do that to get it to talk to the Foundry switch. The actual command may be different, but "help" should get you all the way you need. > Has anyone tried other equipment? Cisco (beta tesing)? I'm trying to get a beta Cisco 7500 series NIC/blade to do testing with but it sounds like their not very far along (not even alpha). I cringe at the thought of doing gigabit ethernet on the Catalyst's 1.2gigabit backplane. > YAGO? Now that Yago is cabletron I don't think we'll see many yago made gigabit products. Cabletron has a 2 port blade for the SS 9000 (MMAC+) but haven't tried it either. Our Network Engineers refuse to even talk to them :) > Success stories? Horror stories? I know I've mentioned this before, but getting the gigabit working was one of the most painless things I've ever done. I've used NIC's from Alteon (on the netapp), Packet Engines (on the DEC) and Essential (on the DEC) and minus some small driver bugs have had VERY little problems. They all interoperated very well. > I need to go from FDDI to something faster (and less expensive). > ATM is not it.. :) NetApp's didn't do voice or video last I checked so why ATM? :) > My plan is to put the filers on gigabit, as well as our backups > machine and the heavy use clients (servers). The rest of the servers > can use switched 100mbit. I've never used Prominet's switch, but have heard some good feedback about them. Not as good as some other's, but good performance nonetheless. Depending on how many machines you have, getting a Foundry FastIron with a single or dual gig uplink may work well. Never use Extreme. Their products may be decent, but their sales people/sale engineers really rubbed me the wrong the way. Overall rude and deceitful. Plus, who wants purple switches? :) JE

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ndmp copy?
by Alexei Rodriguez 19 Feb '98

19 Feb '98

I have heard of folks dumping an entire filer to another via ndmp copy. Next week I will be having to do something like that and was wondering what sort of speed I might expect (if this thing exists). Also, does it do snapshots as well? Alexei

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Re: Subscribe
by Brian Tao 19 Feb '98

19 Feb '98

> Date: Wed, 18 Feb 1998 15:11:46 +0000 > From: Lars J�nson <lars(a)datapp.com> > Organization: Data Appliance Scandinavia AB > To: toasters(a)mathworks.com > Subject: Subscribe > > I would like to subscribe > Lars Well, it's not exactly from a *Netapp* employee this time, but it sounds pretty close... ;-) -- Brian Tao (BT300, taob(a)netcom.ca) "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"

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(no subject)
by Douglas A. Mendoza 19 Feb '98

19 Feb '98

subscribe -- Douglas A. Mendoza Network Appliance, Inc. Website Technical Editor http://now.netapp.com/ phone 408.376.3776 http://www.netapp.com/ e-mail dmendoza(a)netapp.com

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Re: Silly snapshot question
by Daniel Quinlan 19 Feb '98

19 Feb '98

rasmus(a)bellglobal.com writes: > bigdisk> df > Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on > / 170788336 71454936 99333400 42% / > /.snapshot 18976480 5180276 13796204 27% /.snapshot > > I was expecting to see 70% utilization on my .snapshot file system > here. Why is it only 27%? From this output I can only conclude that I > have a lot of room and I don't need to bump up my reserve. total disk space 170788336 + 18976480 = 189764816 bytes reserve calculation 189764816 * 10% reservation = 18976480 bytes snapshot usage 5180276 / 18976480 = 27% That's 27% of the amount you reserved. I don't know where you got the 70% figure from. Don't use "snap list" to calculate anything other than which snapshot needs to be deleted first in a crisis. Dan

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AIT vs. DLT7000
by Steve Gremban 19 Feb '98

19 Feb '98

Alexei, We are using DLT7000 (5-10 MB/sec depending on compression) drives which actually outperform the Sony AIT (3-7.8 MB/sec depending on compression). We are not quite seeing 2:1 compression, we get about 60GB compressed on each 35GB tape. -Steve Gremban gremban(a)ti.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Previous message follows: I would like to see AIT supported; we currently use DLT, but as our backup needs are approaching 300GB (well, as soon as I get my new filer), DLT is not cutting it (backup/restore times are too long). Also, the media is a huge problem (DLT's are not all too happy with a drop...). I suspect that these additional drives will be supported eventually. Alexei -----------------------------------------------------------------------

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Silly snapshot question
by rasmus＠bellglobal.com 19 Feb '98

19 Feb '98

I was looking at my 630 trying to figure out if it was safe to add another nightly snapshot. According to the Sys-Admin manual on page 10-13 it shows an example where a snap reserve is set to 20% and a 'snap list' shows only 10% utilization. The suggestion is to drop the reserve from 20% down to 12 or 15% assuming usage patterns remain constant. Great, this make sense to me. However, when I look at my system I have: bigdisk> snap reserve Current snapshot reserve is 10% or 18976480 k-bytes. bigdisk> snap list working...................................................... %/used %/total date name ---------- ---------- ------------ -------- 0% ( 0%) 0% ( 0%) Feb 18 12:01 hourly.0 1% ( 0%) 0% ( 0%) Feb 18 08:01 hourly.1 2% ( 1%) 1% ( 0%) Feb 18 00:01 nightly.0 2% ( 1%) 1% ( 0%) Feb 17 20:01 hourly.2 3% ( 1%) 1% ( 0%) Feb 17 16:01 hourly.3 3% ( 1%) 1% ( 0%) Feb 17 12:01 hourly.4 5% ( 3%) 2% ( 1%) Feb 17 08:01 hourly.5 7% ( 4%) 3% ( 1%) Feb 17 00:01 nightly.1 So, so far it would indicate that my 10% reserve is probably a pretty good number for the current setup and if I want to add another nightly snapshot I should probably bump my reserve up a couple of percent to be safe. However, then I do a df: bigdisk> df Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on / 170788336 71454936 99333400 42% / /.snapshot 18976480 5180276 13796204 27% /.snapshot I was expecting to see 70% utilization on my .snapshot file system here. Why is it only 27%? From this output I can only conclude that I have a lot of room and I don't need to bump up my reserve. I must have missed something along the way. -Rasmus

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None
by Christina Sanfilippo 18 Feb '98

18 Feb '98

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toasters February 1998