toasters

toasters@lists.teaparty.net

13515 discussions

Instability with full filesystems?
by Brian Tao 25 Nov '97

25 Nov '97

Has anyone noticed OnTAP 4.2a crashing when the WAFL filesystem uses up all available disk space or inodes? I was doing a series of ndmpcopies to several filers, with the intent to complete fill them to capacity with as many 2GB files as I could fit. One of the four filers crashed and rebooted early this morning: Tue Nov 25 06:00:04 EST [statd]: 6:00am up 14:40 1362 NFS ops, 0 CIFS ops, 0 HTTP ops Tue Nov 25 07:00:03 EST [statd]: 7:00am up 15:40 1362 NFS ops, 0 CIFS ops, 0 HTTP ops Tue Nov 25 12:37:32 GMT [rc]: saving 59M to /etc/crash/core.0-small ("trap 13 code = 0 eip = 196aad cs = 8 eflags = 10246 ") Tue Nov 25 12:38:04 GMT [rc]: saving 258M to /etc/crash/core.0 ("trap 13 code = 0 eip = 196aad cs = 8 eflags = 10246 ") Tue Nov 25 12:38:41 GMT [wafl_lopri]: file system is full Tue Nov 25 12:38:41 GMT [rc]: (out of disk space?) Tue Nov 25 07:38:51 EST [rc]: relog syslog Tue Nov 25 07:00:03 EST [statd]: 7:00am up 15:40 1362 NFS ops, 0 CIFS ops, 0 HTTP ops Tue Nov 25 07:38:51 EST [rc]: NetApp Release 4.2a boot complete. Tue Nov 25 07:38:52 EST [asup_main]: System Notification mail sent There wasn't enough room to save the large core file, but the small one appears to be intact. I saw something similar happen on a different filer when it ran out of inodes (unfortuately, I didn't save a copy of the panic message). If the crashes are related to full filesystem conditions, I won't worry about it too much. Just curious. ;-) -- Brian Tao (BT300, taob(a)netcom.ca) "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"

1 0

Re: F630 4.2a CIFS unable to access snapshots?
by Daniel Quinlan 25 Nov '97

25 Nov '97

Steve Losen <scl(a)sasha.acc.virginia.edu> writes: > We have a F630 running 4.2a and are having trouble accessing > snapshots with CIFS. This may be unrelated, but some NFS clients have problems using the .snapshot way of accessing snapshots. Apparently, Netapp returns the same NFS filehandle or at least the same inode number for snapshots as for the current version of the file, and this can confuse NFS clients. sodium:~ $ ls -i .profile 602274 .profile sodium:~ $ ls -i .snapshot/hourly.0/.profile 602274 .snapshot/hourly.0/.profile To work around this problem, we set up a separate NFS export of filer:/.snapshot that we mount under /snapshot/filer. That way, you can use a completely different mount point to recover a file and the inode problem is a non-issue. Since we've had people experience file corruption when using the .snapshot in their working directory, and no problems when using the separate mount point, I asked NetApp several times for an option to disable all .snapshots except for the root one. - Dan

2 1

RE: auto-mounting CIFS shares at boot time?
by Bruce Clarke 24 Nov '97

24 Nov '97

On Monday, November 24, 1997 3:07 PM, rasmus(a)bellglobal.com [SMTP:rasmus@bellglobal.com] wrote: > Please take pity on a poor Unix hack who has gotten a bunch of NT > servers > shoved onto his network. > > I am trying to get these boxes to automatically mount a CIFS share > when > they boot. So far I have only been able to get the share to come up > when > I log a user in. When the user logs out the share disappears. Not > exactly > a good thing when you have a web server service running in the > background > trying to serve up pages directly from this Netapp cifs share. My > kingdom > for /etc/vfstab for NT! > > Any tips would be appreciated. > > -Rasmus Check out a facility called "Autoexnt". It is on the MS Tech-Net CDROM and an archive for it also exists at: http://www.savilltech.com/ntfaq/sysconf.html#sysconf43 Bruce Clarke - Database Market Development Manager Network Appliance, Inc. 2770 San Tomas Expressway Santa Clara, CA 95051 USA Phone: 1-408-367-3156 FAX: 1-408-367-3151 Email: bclarke(a)netapp.com WWW: www.netapp.com

1 0

630 Quad ethernet interface?
by Wayne 23 Nov '97

23 Nov '97

Hello, We received our first NetApp, a 630 with a slew of quad ethernet interfaces in it recently. My plan was to connect a number of Sun Ultra 2's directly to the filer using crossed ethernet cables. Also, Sun sells a QFE (Quad Fast Ethernet) card that supports the "trunking" of all four ports of this card which allows an 800Mb/s (100x4xfull duplex) connection toother compatible devices (other Suns, I assume some ethernet switches, etc.) Does anyone know if the quad ethernet controllers in the 630 can be configured this way? Also, has anyone benchmarked how much data a NetApp 630 can push to half a dozen to a dozen Ultra 2's that are directly connected via 100mb/s full duplex connections? Any tuning hints? I'd definitely appreciate learning from the collective experience. -- Wayne D. Correia Critical Path Inc. tel: +1-415-543-2800 CTO 320 First Street fax: +1-415-543-2830 www.criticalpath.net San Francisco, CA 94105 gsm: +1-415-826-6000 "we handle the world's email" http://www.criticalpath.net

5 4

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

Teardrop Attack?
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 17 Nov '97

17 Nov '97

Has anyone verified if Data OnTap is susceptible to the "teardrop" attack? For those interested in the information on the specifics, refer to: http://www.rootshell.com/hacking/teardrop.c Bruce

2 1

Re: Upgrading from an F330
by mds46523＠ggr.co.uk 17 Nov '97

17 Nov '97

Here's the idea we like the most round here, but it takes investment. Be persuasive with your salesguy and arrange for a newer box, F520 say, spec'd to cope and arrange for a decent overlap between setting up the new system and taking the old one away - if you get some kinda upgrade deal that is. Sounds like you could probably use a nice stable F330 elsewhere anyway so you might keep the old box too. 8) Use NDMPCopy 1.1 (with DOT4.3 I think) to do a big copy of all the data when things aren't too exciting on the network or the filer. Either that or use a full backup on tape to copy the bulk of the data. (presupposing you take local backups like we do, which most people appear not to for some reason) When you get your chance to actually do the switcheroo take the F330 offline wrt the clients, do a final incremental to the new box over the network, make the new box look like the old one to the world (and make the old one look like something else...too) and do a bit of testing from your clients. If all seems stable at that stage then run with it in full-production style. If problems crop up, you can breath a sigh of relief that all the old data is still safe and instantly accessible on the old filer and deal with things as they happen. If you've gotten through your first, say, couple of weeks then you can have high confidence that the new filer won't give out on you. Certainly this is pretty much how things have worked when we've upgraded our filers here (and believe me, I've now upgraded 8 in different and *interesting* ways). The real enabler for us to do the job without threatening the data (the important stuff after all) was that our NetApp engineers let us sit on kit when things looked dicy and gave us excellent support in putting the boxes together and dealing with the bedding-in problems. I could tell you tales of the late nights they've put in completely stripping down and rebuilding cabinets full of kit... All you need is the option to backout and suddenly going forward doesn't seem quite so nerve-wracking. Plus the visible downtime of the data can be cut to minutes if you have the details down pat. Hope this helps. On Nov 15, 9:39, Daniel Quinlan wrote: > Subject: Upgrading from an F330 > One of our filers, an F330, is very overloaded (80-100% CPU usage and > 1000-1500 NFS ops/sec for most of the 24 hour day) and is always very > close to being full. Both shelf pairs are full of 4 GB disks. We > also have an F540 and an F630, which are far less loaded. > > Interestingly, the F330 is the most stable filer we have had: no disk > failures in over a year, no major problems. I wish our other filers > were so rock solid. *sigh* Our other two filers have had so many > problems, I can't remember them all: failed disks, failed ethernet > transceiver, bad shelves, SCSI problems, etc. > > Unfortunately, the data on the F330 is some of most critical data at > our company. More than a few hours of downtime is *not* an option. > > I read Tom Yates's "migrating an F330 to a mixed-disc configuration" > messages, so I'm not really inclined to try that. Are there any other > options for fixing the performance and disk space problem that you > would recommend? > > - Dan >-- End of excerpt from Daniel Quinlan -- -Mark, TSG Unix admin and support, int 782 4412, ext +44 1438 76 4412. ... an Englishman in London ...

1 0

Re: Experiences with CIFS
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 16 Nov '97

16 Nov '97

On 11/12/97 09:36:10 you wrote: >CIFS is new to the NetApp boxen and it seems to work pretty well, but >NFS was your first baby and you have not done anything yet to help us >in this world who need one item - soft quotas. There may be some confusion as to *exactly* what you mean by soft quotas, and how they work. Someone once asked me that the next time someone mentioned this, to ask them to PLEASE explain what you expect the soft quotas to do, how they work, and how they currently work on your other (say, Sun) machines. Bruce

9 16

Upgrading from an F330
by Daniel Quinlan 15 Nov '97

15 Nov '97

One of our filers, an F330, is very overloaded (80-100% CPU usage and 1000-1500 NFS ops/sec for most of the 24 hour day) and is always very close to being full. Both shelf pairs are full of 4 GB disks. We also have an F540 and an F630, which are far less loaded. Interestingly, the F330 is the most stable filer we have had: no disk failures in over a year, no major problems. I wish our other filers were so rock solid. *sigh* Our other two filers have had so many problems, I can't remember them all: failed disks, failed ethernet transceiver, bad shelves, SCSI problems, etc. Unfortunately, the data on the F330 is some of most critical data at our company. More than a few hours of downtime is *not* an option. I read Tom Yates's "migrating an F330 to a mixed-disc configuration" messages, so I'm not really inclined to try that. Are there any other options for fixing the performance and disk space problem that you would recommend? - Dan

1 0

subscribe toasters
by Waiming Mok 14 Nov '97

14 Nov '97

subscribe toasters

1 0

Re: "fchown: Not owner" errors between Digital Unix 4.0b ftpd and filer
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

On 11/13/97 12:25:56 you wrote: > >Greetings, > >We operate an anonymous FTP service using the wuarchive FTP daemon >(wu-2.4.2-academ[BETA-13]) on an Alpha running Digital Unix 4.0b. The >files are stored on a filer running 4.0.1c. > >>From time to time we set up anonymous FTP groups, so remote anonymous >users can supply a group password to gain special access to normally >inaccessible areas. When the FTP data area was on a local file system >on an OSF/1 3.2 system, people could use this group access to upload >files onto the FTP server. Now that we have upgraded the OS and moved >the data to a filer, attempts to do this result in the error > 550 fchown: Not owner. > >and a 0-length file on the filer. > >Can anybody shed light on why this might be happening? I ran into a similar problem with BSD/OS doing the same thing. It seems to be like it changes the group first, and then this results in the writes failing when it goes into "normal" permission mode. But it did not occur from a Solaris client. I didn't get a packet trace at the time, so I couldn't figure out if it was a problem with the filer, the OS, or in the way wuftpd is coded. Never tired Digital Unix, but if it's in there, then it is probably worth the time for Netapp to investigate this and determine exactly where the problem lies. Bruce

2 1

F220 needing upgrade
by fred.abounader＠vantis.com 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

Situation: I have an F220 with 2 shelves all slots full with 4G drives. I need to more disk space. Problem(s): An F220 can only accomodate 2 shelves. Possible Solution 1: Make the F220 an F330 with an F330 spares kit and add 2 more shelves and drives. Questions: Does anybody have any Storage Work shelves (BA35X-MD-2X) they want to unload? Do I want to mix 9G drives (in the new shelves) with the existing 4G drives (in the existing shelves)? Any other concerns???? Thanks. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~ Fred Abounader Vantis (AMD's PLD Subsidiary) ~ ~ email: fred.abounader(a)vantis.com Mailstop 546 ~ ~ voice: (512)-602-1644 5300 E. Ben White Blvd. ~ ~ FAX: (512)-602-4148 Austin, TX 78741 ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2 1

"fchown: Not owner" errors between Digital Unix 4.0b ftpd and filer
by Mic Kaczmarczik 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

Greetings, We operate an anonymous FTP service using the wuarchive FTP daemon (wu-2.4.2-academ[BETA-13]) on an Alpha running Digital Unix 4.0b. The files are stored on a filer running 4.0.1c. >From time to time we set up anonymous FTP groups, so remote anonymous users can supply a group password to gain special access to normally inaccessible areas. When the FTP data area was on a local file system on an OSF/1 3.2 system, people could use this group access to upload files onto the FTP server. Now that we have upgraded the OS and moved the data to a filer, attempts to do this result in the error 550 fchown: Not owner. and a 0-length file on the filer. Can anybody shed light on why this might be happening? Thanks, Mic Kaczmarczik Unix Services UT Austin Academic Computing -- Mic Kaczmarczik -- Unix Services -- UT Austin Academic Computing (ACITS) --

1 0

Re: NetApp burn-in testing (was "raid swap question")
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

Another test, that has been talked about by Netapp before but which Dave didn't mention, is in-house production testing. Almost every new software release, hardware model, and new feature (like ATM) gets time in production use in Netapp's own "Real World" corporate network, often within Engineering itself. While not specifically a QA function, Netapp does integrate it's own products into their infrastructure as best as possible and such rollouts have proven to be very fruitful at identifying problems and correcting them before they reach the customers. Bruce

1 0

Re: backing up large filers
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

>As for stackers directly attached to the filers, what have folks found >that works? When we first tried this (long ago with an ADIC DLT 2500xt >"stacker"), we found that the stacker mechanism was quite lousy and tended >to hang. Thus we had to reboot the filer to "un-hang" the stacker. I >have stayed away from diretly connected drives since. I used directly attached DLT-4700s at Netapp and never had one with a hung stacker mechanism. If the UNIX host firing off the dump over rsh died, it *could* leave the dump/drive hung and thus requiring a reboot of the filer to fix, but that was rare. Bruce

1 0

Re: raid swap question
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

On 11/04/97 07:02:23 you wrote: > We have a bunch of filers sitting idle waiting for some >back-ordered components, so I've taken the opportunity to "stress" >them and see what breaks. ;-) On a quiet filer (no exports), I >started with a two-disk configuration (it doesn't seem to mind having >only one parity and one data disk) and hot-plugged four more drives in >rapid succession without a `raid swap'. > > The usual warnings on the first write to a new disk were logged, >but then the filer complained about all three SCSI buses (only 9a was >in use at the time). Beyond that there were no other difficulties. Of course, you may have just been lucky. Under different circumstances or configurations it could very easily hang or crash your filer. Don't try this at home, folks (well, at least not until it's supported). You'll note that it had to reset the adapater and the bus to try and regain a sense of sanity. Bruce

3 2

Jump to page:

2025

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