toasters

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13531 discussions

Macs and toasters
by Ketil Kirkerud 10 Jul '97

10 Jul '97

Among our netapps we have a F330 which will soon be put into use as a fileserver for our internal use. We have PCs, various UNIX workstations, and a few Macs. The Macs are giving me a headache - the netapp doesn't support Appletalk, so we are pondering the alternatives : We've tried 'DAVE' from Thursby systems, which gives the Mac CIFS-client capabilities. This works fine with NT servers, however it does not work with netapps. (This is noted in bug #4140 - with no indication of whose problem it is, or, for that matter, when it might be fixed). Other options include NFS client software on the Macs, or setting up a gateway, which will mount the netapp via nfs, and re-export the filesystems via Appletalk (using linux and the free appletalk package, for example). Has anyone tried any of these solutions ? What will work ? regards, -- ---Ketil Kirkerud, Scandinavia Online I synergistically leverage my paradigms

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Re: upgrading from 3.1c to 4.0.1c
by Amy Chused 09 Jul '97

09 Jul '97

At 05:16 PM 7/7/97 -0400, Christoph Doerbeck wrote: >I'm looking for input regarding why I might (or might not) encourage >my users to allow me to upgrade the filer OS from 3.1c to 4.0.1c. >What features are we missing? What pitfalls can I expect? I just >want to cover my bases... > >What we have currently is very stable. As far as I am concerned, there is one major advantage to the 4.x series. It can serve files over CIFS. It can also serve files over http, but that's much less important to me. We have a large and growing number of PCs, and installing NFS software on them is a pain in the rear. Being able to serve files over CIFS is very convenient. If you don't need CIFS or HTTP file service, then it's a much closer call. 'course, 4.x is their current release, and any performance tweaks they make are gonna go into 4.x, which will probably make it a bit faster, and potentially a bit less stable. If you're performance hungry, go with 4.x. If you absolutely have to stay up, ask them for their current list of known bugs in 3.1c and 4.0.1c, read them carefully, and decide which set you're less likely to trigger. They're pretty good with their known bugs list. Amy

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Marking failed drives across boots?
by Steve Gremban 08 Jul '97

08 Jul '97

Had something similar happen to us. One of our Netapps failed a drive and reconstructed its data onto a different drive (from the hot spare pool). The failed drive should have been replaced asap but it fell through the cracks and was forgotten. A week later we shut it down to replace an fddi card and afterwards it wouldn't boot up. The failed drive was apparently working well enough so that the Netapp thought it had a RAID drive that wasn't a valid member of the array (inconsistent disk labels). Once we removed the problem drive the Netapp booted just fine. I don't understand why your bad drive was added to the hot spare pool upon reboot. It should have had a label that was inconsistent with the other drives and the Netapp shouldn't have booted. >> Could the Netapp somehow mark a bad drive so that the information >> is kept across boots? If a failed drive is working after a reboot then its label should be inconsistent with the other drives in the array and the Netapp shouldn't boot. NOTE: For those wondering what label I am talking about here is an excerpt from the System Administrator's Guide chapter on Troubleshooting: The Netapp writes a label on each disk indicating its position in the RAID disk array. regards, Steve Gremban gremban(a)ti.com PS: I noticed that you are running without a hot spare configured. We normally configure a spare in order to minimize time spent at risk in degraded mode. Do you consider the risk is minimal that another drive will fail before the first one is replaced and rebuilt or do you have some plan in place to ensure that someone is notified immediately? What about early in the morning, on weekends, holidays? Anyone else out there running without hot spares? ------------- Begin Forwarded Message ------------- >From madhatta(a)turing.mathworks.com Mon Jul 7 15:40:34 1997 Date: Mon, 7 Jul 1997 16:34:26 -0400 (EDT) From: Brian Tao <taob(a)nbc.netcom.ca> To: toasters(a)mathworks.com Subject: Marking failed drives across boots? MIME-Version: 1.0 We had a problem with our Netapp this morning that could potentially be quite serious. One drive near the beginning of the chain (ID 2, I believe) was failed out by the Netapp. Very shortly thereafter, the filer crashed with a RAID panic and rebooted. Upon rebooting, it noticed that drive ID 2 was not actively being used, and proceeded to add it to the hot spare pool. Then it began reconstructing the data on to (you guessed it) drive ID 2. In this scenario, there was no time to pull out the bad drive, and the Netapp happily rebuilt the data on it. I guess the correct procedure now is to forcibly fail that drive and rebuild to our good spare drive, and remove drive ID 2. Could the Netapp somehow mark a bad drive so that the information is kept across boots? -- Brian Tao (BT300, taob(a)netcom.ca) "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't" ------------- End Forwarded Message -------------

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Re: Marking failed drives across boots?
by Amy Chused 08 Jul '97

08 Jul '97

> Anyone else out there running without hot spares? Now, no. In the past, yes. We were space hungry and we'd maxed on the number of disks in some of our earlier and smaller NetApps, so we threw the spares into the pool because we kept tipping over the 100% full mark and not being able to write anything and that was bad. As it turned out, we were okay. The odds of two disks going bad before you get a chance to replace one of them is fairly minimal, especially if you set the thing to send you e-mail notifying you of a bad drive. Especially if you set the thing to send e-mail to both your mailbox and your pager notifying you of a bad drive. Amy -- who now has enough co-workers to not have to carry a pager 24x7x365 anymore, but who does it anyway.

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Re: upgrading from 3.1c to 4.0.1c
by fred.abounader＠vantis.com 07 Jul '97

07 Jul '97

I would like these answers also? Fred. ---} From madhatta(a)turing.mathworks.com Mon Jul 7 16:22:17 1997 ---} X-Mailer: exmh version 1.6.9 8/22/96 ---} To: toasters(a)mathworks.com ---} Subject: upgrading from 3.1c to 4.0.1c ---} Mime-Version: 1.0 ---} Date: Mon, 07 Jul 1997 17:16:37 -0400 ---} From: Christoph Doerbeck <doerbeck(a)dma.isg.mot.com> ---} ---} ---} I'm looking for input regarding why I might (or might not) encourage ---} my users to allow me to upgrade the filer OS from 3.1c to 4.0.1c. ---} What features are we missing? What pitfalls can I expect? I just ---} want to cover my bases... ---} ---} What we have currently is very stable. ---} ---} ++-------------------------------------------------------------------- ---} Christoph Doerbeck ---} Motorola ISG / DIS email: doerbeck(a)dma.isg.mot.com ---} Mansfield, MA. USA ---} ++-------------------------------------------------------------------- ---} ---}

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upgrading from 3.1c to 4.0.1c
by Christoph Doerbeck 07 Jul '97

07 Jul '97

I'm looking for input regarding why I might (or might not) encourage my users to allow me to upgrade the filer OS from 3.1c to 4.0.1c. What features are we missing? What pitfalls can I expect? I just want to cover my bases... What we have currently is very stable. ++-------------------------------------------------------------------- Christoph Doerbeck Motorola ISG / DIS email: doerbeck(a)dma.isg.mot.com Mansfield, MA. USA ++--------------------------------------------------------------------

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Marking failed drives across boots?
by Brian Tao 07 Jul '97

07 Jul '97

We had a problem with our Netapp this morning that could potentially be quite serious. One drive near the beginning of the chain (ID 2, I believe) was failed out by the Netapp. Very shortly thereafter, the filer crashed with a RAID panic and rebooted. Upon rebooting, it noticed that drive ID 2 was not actively being used, and proceeded to add it to the hot spare pool. Then it began reconstructing the data on to (you guessed it) drive ID 2. In this scenario, there was no time to pull out the bad drive, and the Netapp happily rebuilt the data on it. I guess the correct procedure now is to forcibly fail that drive and rebuild to our good spare drive, and remove drive ID 2. Could the Netapp somehow mark a bad drive so that the information is kept across boots? -- Brian Tao (BT300, taob(a)netcom.ca) "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"

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Re: [sm_recover] error messages
by Michael Cerda 07 Jul '97

07 Jul '97

I found that the erros would recur and that the system would regenerate the files and the data inside. I remove the state and notify files and then create empty versions. -Michael Cerda

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Subscribe
by Matthew J. Howarth 07 Jul '97

07 Jul '97

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Re: Filers for a large mail environment
by Edward Henigin 04 Jul '97

04 Jul '97

I wanna talk this out. What do you mean about "100,000 files in a directory will cause you performance problems"? I was told by Network Appliance that their WAFFLE filesystem (or whatever) hashes the directory entries internally, so there are *no* scaling issues with regards to directories with many entries in them. Are you wrong? Or is Network Appliances wrong? Please help. Ed Henigin ed(a)texas.net ps just what the heck do you mean by 'setting up a directory hashing scheme' ? Are you talking about the MTA and/or POP3 servers having their own databases of filename->inode mappings? Your terminoligy seems vague, maybe that's where my confusion stems. -- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 02 Jul 1997 17:54:13 +0100 From: Dom Mitchell <hdm(a)demon.net> To: Alan Judge <Alan.Judge(a)indigo.ie> Cc: toasters(a)mathworks.com Subject: Re: Filers for a large mail environment [...deletia...] Shared maildrops are a different issue. If you use something like qmail[1], OTOH, there are simply no locking issues whatsoever (and easy POP3 support, but no IMAP). We do something similiar (although propietary) for about 100,000 users, and it works well. Don't ^^^^^ forget to set up a directory hashing scheme, though as 100,000 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ files in a directory will also cause you performance problems. :-) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ -Dom [1] <URL:http://www.qmail.org/> -----End of forwarded message-----

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Re: [sm_recover] error messages
by Amy Chused 03 Jul '97

03 Jul '97

At 10:57 AM 7/3/97 -0400, Christoph Doerbeck wrote: >> The filers try to save state so they know what machines are clients of theirs. >> Go ahead and blow away the /etc/sm/recover and/or the /etc/sm/state files. >> It doesn't hurt the filer; the filer will regenerate those files when it >> needs them, but it'll get rid of the error messages from the filer trying >> to talk to machines that don't exist anymore. >What you say makes sense, but the only files in /etc/sm are : state,monitor, >and notify. I tried moving /etc/sm/state but the messages are still coming. My apologies. It was an off-the-cuff answer. I should have said notify when I said recover. (I'm working on setting up a backup system here, so I've got recover on the mind). It's definitely safe to blow away the notify file. >Is it safe to remove all files in the /etc/sm directory? I belive so. >The F330 is running version 3.1c mm-hmm. I've run just about all the versions since 2.something-early, up to 4.0.1c. 3.1c is pretty good. Amy

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Re: [sm_recover] error messages
by Amy Chused 03 Jul '97

03 Jul '97

At 08:11 AM 7/3/97 -0400, Christoph Doerbeck wrote: >Could anyone shed some light on what is generating the following messages >on one of our netapp F330's: > >[sm_recover]: get RPC port for <host=machinea.foo.com,prog=100024,ver=1,prot=17 >> failed >[sm_recover]: no address for host <machineb.foo.com> > >The listed machines were recently taken out of service or moved to another >network. Any opions are welcome... The filers try to save state so they know what machines are clients of theirs. Go ahead and blow away the /etc/sm/recover and/or the /etc/sm/state files. It doesn't hurt the filer; the filer will regenerate those files when it needs them, but it'll get rid of the error messages from the filer trying to talk to machines that don't exist anymore. Amy

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[sm_recover] error messages
by Christoph Doerbeck 03 Jul '97

03 Jul '97

Could anyone shed some light on what is generating the following messages on one of our netapp F330's: [sm_recover]: get RPC port for <host=machinea.foo.com,prog=100024,ver=1,prot=17 > failed [sm_recover]: no address for host <machineb.foo.com> The listed machines were recently taken out of service or moved to another network. Any opions are welcome... ++-------------------------------------------------------------------- Christoph Doerbeck Motorola ISG email: doerbeck(a)dma.isg.mot.com Mansfield, MA. USA ++--------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: Filers for a large mail environment
by Alan Judge 03 Jul '97

03 Jul '97

Dom> It all depends on whether you mean "shared mail queue" or "shared Dom> maildrops"... Sharing the mail queue is a big nono, really. Dom> None of the existing MTA's support doing this, and it will cause Dom> you slow mail delivery and general havoc. Shared maildrops and home directories is what I'm looking for. I'm planning to leave the mail queues on the individual machines, though a combined view of everything would be nice. (Actually storing each machine's queue (separately) on the filer might be nice for reliability and management reasons. I'm not sure about performance.) Dom> Shared maildrops are a different issue. If you use something Dom> like qmail[1], OTOH, there are simply no locking issues Dom> whatsoever (and easy POP3 support, but no IMAP). I'll have another look at qmail, but we're pretty firmly entrenched in the sendmail camp at the moment, for a variety of reasons. Dom> Don't forget to set up a directory hashing scheme, though as Dom> 100,000 files in a directory will also cause you performance Dom> problems. :-) I'll probably do this anyway while switching over. We don't have enough files now to be much of an issue on a WAFL file system, but we might as well put in the scalability now. -- Alan

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Re: Filers for a large mail environment
by Alan Judge 03 Jul '97

03 Jul '97

Joel> My understanding is that even with nfs locking having multiple Joel> systems do delivery is not safe. Probably, though having one delivery system and multiple POP/IMAP system might be nearly as bad. It depends. Joel> Could you live with a single (+ backup) delivery system? Having Joel> several MXs of different preferences should be ok as I would Joel> expect only one to actually be delivering mail at any time. Probably. We'll have to test performance for this setup. -- Alan

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NetApp Errors
by John F. Kane 02 Jul '97

02 Jul '97

Has anyone experienced any of the following errors on their F330 (or any other) filer running Release 4.0.1c? 1.) Unexplained reboots 2.) portmapper errors-> [portmapper]: portmap: prog (100004,2,2) not registered 3.) rsh hangs -> "system hung (rshd_0)!" 4.) machine check -> MACHINE CHECK: addr 0037470c,mctd,PCMC ERRSTS 8 5.) crash -> "trap 13 code=0 eip=20625f cs=8 eflangs=10202" Any help would be appreciated. -- John F. Kane Joint Analysis Center, EUCOM The MITRE Corporation

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Filers for a large mail environment
by Alan Judge 02 Jul '97

02 Jul '97

We're considering purchasing filer(s) as part of a mail system upgrade. Setup would be a cluster of redundant and very similarly configured machine around one or more filers containing all the real data (/var/spool/mail for customers, some web serving, and other stuff). Most likely all the clustered machines will do delivery to the shared area and POP/IMAP reading. Our desired platform is PCs running FreeBSD (or perhaps BSDI). One major problem is that none of the PC Unix environments (FreeBSD, BSDI, Linux) have working NFS file locking. We could implement some hacks using file based locking, but I'm worried about the hassle and performance issues here. In fact, even with working NFS locking, I'd be worried about sharing mail spools in this fashion. I've also had advice from people who recommend avoiding NFS entirely and going for transparent proxies and multiple machines for scalability. But that leaves a reliability/redundancy issue (hardware RAIDs, s/w mirroring, ...). What I'm wondering and perhaps people on the list can help is: - anyone doing something similar in an ISP environment (what platform, what filer, how many users?) - any advice/ideas on the locking issue - will filers perform well in this environment? some of the client applications are not well behaved and do things like copy the entire mail box; local disk would obviously be faster (I can get over 35MB/sec using multiple local disks on PCs), but I'm not sure it's that big an issue -- Alan Judge Phone: +353-1-6046901 Indigo Network Operations Centre Fax: +353-1-6046948

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archive
by Tom Yates 02 Jul '97

02 Jul '97

i'm getting a report that the archive is impossible to get to. can anyone who has experienced problems in getting to the toasters archive (http://teaparty.mathworks.com:1999/toasters/archive/) let me know? thanks. 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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Re: PC-NFS file problems
by Jose M. Alvarez 30 Jun '97

30 Jun '97

Fred, Could you please provide some details on the configuration you are using (i.e. what PC-NFS package and what MS office version). Some PC apps, like Office, use the CIFS file locking to implement semaphores. In some cases, this causes problems on the PC application. NetApp's solution is to provide the Microsoft file sharing protocol, CIFS, on the filer, thus guaranteeing good integration with PC apps and at the same time provide access to the same data that is being accessed or written over NFS (from UNIX). Jose At 11:37 26/06/97 -0500, you wrote: > >Has anybody other than myself had problems with MS Word (.doc) and Excel (.xls) >files stored on a NetApps (F-220) periodically being corrupted? > >I have had a half dozen or so problems in the last 6 months. Example is I have >.xls files that start to load in Excel and about 1/2 way (looking at bar scale >at the bottom of Excel) they spit out an error message "Unable to read file." > >Fred. > >"NetApps are (or maybe 'were') dependable, but STILL not as fast as my Sparc 20." > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jose M. Alvarez Product Marketing Manager Direct: (408) 367-3271 Network Appliance Corporate: (408) 367-3100 2770 San Tomas Expressway Fax: (408) 367-3151 Santa Clara, CA 95051 Email: jose(a)netapp.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------

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nouces
by Tom Yates 27 Jun '97

27 Jun '97

i'm beginning to get bounces on this list, which i suppose is a logical consequence of size. given that these are "not known at this address"-type bounces, i'm inclined to just remove people with vi when this sort of thing happens. hope noone objects to that. 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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DLT4000 drives on F220
by Brian Tao 26 Jun '97

26 Jun '97

Is there a software patch that will allow me to use a Sun-brand DLT4000 external SCSI-2 tape drive with a Netapp? I plugged one in, and the Netapp complained that "SUN DLT4000" wasn't a supported drive. Aren't these just Quantum mechanisms inside, but with Sun's name in the vendor string? I'd really rather not have to go out and buy all new drives... -- Brian Tao (BT300, taob(a)netcom.ca) "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"

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PC-NFS file problems
by fred.abounader＠vantis.com 26 Jun '97

26 Jun '97

Has anybody other than myself had problems with MS Word (.doc) and Excel (.xls) files stored on a NetApps (F-220) periodically being corrupted? I have had a half dozen or so problems in the last 6 months. Example is I have .xls files that start to load in Excel and about 1/2 way (looking at bar scale at the bottom of Excel) they spit out an error message "Unable to read file." Fred. "NetApps are (or maybe 'were') dependable, but STILL not as fast as my Sparc 20."

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archive
by Tom Yates 25 Jun '97

25 Jun '97

in response to requests, there's now a toasters archive. http://teaparty.mathworks.com:1999/toasters/archive . fwiw, that's a new dns record which i just made, so it might take a while for the new record to propagate around to you all. at the moment, the archive will be updated when i get around to it. i'll probably automate that at some point. there's no mechanism for submitting a post to toasters without having it archived, and i'll get around to doing that if enough people ask me. 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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Re: NetApp Toaster FAQ
by Amy Chused 24 Jun '97

24 Jun '97

First off, thank you Dave for an excellent summary. And now for a few comments: > FAServer 400 The first box. A black tower tower unit. The > systems units held 7 GB and could do 400 > ops/sec. (Hence the name.) We've got one of these. It's got 7x2GB disks for 14 GB of disk space that, with parity and file system overhead comes out to about 10 GB of usable RAID storage. It's been in the back closet for almost a year now, but we still periodically think about playing with it again. If we don't find a production use for it soon, and if netapp doesn't offer a good trade in value for it, I think my boss is gonna let me take it home and play with it. > FAServer 450 Same box, but with a faster CPU. Maybe we also > allowed the expansion cabinet (a second black > tower) at the same time. We've got a few of these in use right now. These took 4 GB disks and had room for 14 disks inside (slightly bigger box, beige). I know we've got at least one, possible 2 or 3 still in production use. The one I know about has 7x2GB and 7x4GB for about 30 GB effective storage. > F330 The first PCI bus. The first bright blue Got one of these. It holds hundreds and hundreds of home directories, plus other stuff. > F540 Twice as fast as the F330. (Cool silver metal Got one of these. It does news. > F220 NUCLEAR BANANA BEZEL!!! Ahem. This is a cost Got one of these. It does suport for some production machines, cuz we wanted to split off the F330, where the users constantly use up all the available space and take more, from the production NFS server, where we control and even, to some degree, predict how much space each service uses. I like the NUCLEAR BANANA BEZEL too. So, I've got two more questions, one semi-technical, and one not: 1. How do you delete the file system on a NetApp? If I want to newfs the file system, how do I do it? 2. What are the various names people have given their machines? We've had toaster, blender, fridge, icebox, tv, vcr, vaccuum, washer, compactor, furnace, and microwave. (No, we don't have that many netapps--some of these names are on different interfaces of the same boxes, or a box that was retired, and then reused elsewhere with a different name.) Amy

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None
by Jaye Mathisen 24 Jun '97

24 Jun '97

Wanna kill your filer? Put lots of big directories with lots of files in there, then watch the nfs server not responding messages start up. I have an F540, 256MB RAM, and 8MB NVRAM that is just getting wiped out with numerous large directories. (~40-50k files/dir). Hangs of 20-30 seconds are not uncommon, sometimes as long as 3 minutes. Needless to say, we are not amused.

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