toasters

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13515 discussions

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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quick usenet poll
by Kenneth Whittaker 23 Jun '97

23 Jun '97

Usenet admins.... Just curious folks. How big are the history files out there? The history.pag? Ken. -- Kenneth Whittaker Network Appliance Technical Support: 888-4-NETAPP

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Re: archive
by Tracy Howard 20 Jun '97

20 Jun '97

Brian, Some of these questions are answered on NOW, Netapp's online support solution. Check it out if you haven't already looked at the site. The URL for the site is http://now.netapp.com/. Also, for the questions that you pose here...I will make certain that they do get answered on NOW. Thanks. At 04:22 PM 6/20/97 -0400, Brian Tao wrote: >On Fri, 20 Jun 1997, Tom Yates wrote: >> >> b) no. volunteers? i haven't noticed any questions popping up >> repetitively yet, so i have 0 idea what would be on it. > > Well, these questions probably haven't been repeated all that >much, but getting answers to them would be a good start to a FAQ. > >1) What is a NetApp Model XYZ? [Have a brief feature list and >product position summary for anything NetApp ever made, like the >FAservers, the F220 vs. F210/F230, etc. Maybe we could get some >anecdotes related to the choice of faceplate colours for the various >filers ;-) ] > >2) What third-party components can I use? [Product number and >vendors for drives, RAM, cables, shelves and canisters. Include >suitable disclaimers that you may void your warranty or support >contract, etc.] > >3) How do I shrink the filesystem on a NetApp? [Heck, I haven't >figured this out... only way is backup to tape, restripe the whole >unit and restore from tape?] > >4) Why does Solaris 2.5 'du' not show the right file sizes? >[Actually, I think this is covered in the Solaris FAQ too] > >5) Why can't I put more than 52GB on an F210 or F220, even though it >can physically hold more? > > That's all I can think of at the moment. >-- >Brian Tao (BT300, taob(a)netcom.ca) >"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't" > > > *********************************************************** Tracy Howard Customer Satisfaction NOW Project Lead and Technical Writer tracyh(a)netapp.com now.netapp.com -->check it out

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Re: Hello...
by sthaug＠nethelp.no 20 Jun '97

20 Jun '97

> I would be very interested to hear from other people using NetApps for > news spools for any advice on optimally configuring the NetApp for > this purpose. > > e.g., no snapshots, increase the number of inodes, no atime update, > disable NFS over TCP, ...? That last paragraph pretty much describes our situation - and it works like a charm! And yes, we have a private 100 Mbps Ethernet (crossover cable) between the Ultrasparc and the NetApp. We keep active, history and outgoing on local disk, and use the NetApp for articles and over- view. The Ultrasparc/Solaris 2.5.1/NetApp system has been *extremely* stable for us. Not a single crash of any kind during several months of service. It just runs. We're happy :-) Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug(a)nethelp.no

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Re: quick usenet poll
by sthaug＠nethelp.no 20 Jun '97

20 Jun '97

> Are people actually putting history files on the NetApp? Ours isn't. Same here. I did what I thought was the obvious thing - put history, active, outgoing and logs on local disks. Use the NetApp for article and overview spool. Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug(a)nethelp.no

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Re: quick usenet poll
by sthaug＠nethelp.no 19 Jun '97

19 Jun '97

> Just curious folks. How big are the history files out there? > The history.pag? 14 days of history here (just after expire has trimmed it): -rw-rw-r-- 1 news news 407992941 Jun 20 00:50 history -rw-rw-r-- 1 news news 84156772 Jun 20 00:50 history.pag history.pag has holes. Real size is only about half of the apparent size given above. Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug(a)nethelp.no

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test - please ignore
by Tom Yates 19 Jun '97

19 Jun '97

please ignore this test. i apologise for the bandwidth loss. 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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SUBSCRIBE
by Patrick O'Malley, IAC, 617-393-3415 19 Jun '97

19 Jun '97

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Re: NetApp v Suns
by dheiland＠lucent.com 18 Jun '97

18 Jun '97

> From hitz(a)netapp.com Tue Jun 17 22:22 BST 1997 > > It is important for people to understand that LADDIS is a very hard > load, and in real-world environments people will often see much higher > throughput than LADDIS would seem to predict. I recently got a note > from a customer "complaining" that his F230 was running at a sustained > load of over 3300 ops per second, which is over double the LADDIS > "limit" for that system. > > But don't assume that LADDIS results will limit the performance that > you see in a particular real-world environment. I see your point about NFS ops. I would guess then that if this customer was seeing a high percentage usage of the cpu then that would be the indicator that the box was overloaded. And that's not something one can easily extrapolate from the cpu performance of Suns or any other boxes. Estimating the size of filer needed doesn't seem very straightforward then, except by disk sizes. Dave

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Re: NetApp v Suns
by Ketil Kirkerud 18 Jun '97

18 Jun '97

Dave Heiland <dheiland(a)lucent.com> writes: [...] > What kind of loading are people seeing on > their netapps, e.g. 500nfs ops, 2000 nfs ops, any over the limit of the > F540? I've seen 2223 nfsops/sec on _average_ over 6 hours on one of our 540s. It peaked around 6000 :-) (for a few minutes) By the way - This is from our 330 : Wed Jun 18 10:00:05 MET [statd]: 10:00am up 91 days, 18:07 -1750342549 NFS ops I just _love_ the signed 32-bit nfs-op counter - the log looks quite interesting : Tue Jun 3 14:00:05 MET [statd]: 2:00pm up 76 days, 23:27 2145791234 NFS ops Tue Jun 3 15:00:05 MET [statd]: 3:00pm up 77 days, 27 mins, -2147354925 NFS ops -- ---Ketil Kirkerud, Scandinavia Online I synergistically leverage my paradigms

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Advice/suggestions
by Philip Thomas 17 Jun '97

17 Jun '97

Ladies & gentlemen, We use FAServers at our department since Feb. 1994. Since then we have had five units from model 450, F330 to F540. At one point or other our NFS clients were HP, Digital, IBM/RS6000, SGI, Convex, Apollo and even MAC (via Xinet software). Packages range from Cadence to Framemaker to other semiconductor manufacturing related simulators. We have documented uptime of over 99.7%, which includes scheduled downtime. Its truly a lights out operation. Needless to say I am a big fan of the product, to date. Yet, when a sisterly department was looking into NFS fileservers, FAServer was brushed off their short list, which included only SUN and Auspex. Even after two hours of discussion with one of the key IS member I still was in the dark on why FAServer was not even in the running. >From what little I could gather, the only sour note on FAServer was "Network Appliance lack of industry standards"; whatever that means. My guess is that the other prominent players were pointing to the fact that FAServer file system is not "BSD or System5", their OS is not "UNIX" and so on and so forth. When I look at NetApp's brochure, there is no reference to any "standards" or their membership/affiliation to any of the scores of industry consortiums. I tried my best to get something in writing from NetApp stating their commitment on standards. Folks, I know this is absurd. But I had to do it. Anyway, NetApp conveniently ignored my request. So this is you mission, if you chose so... Please let me know if the alleged "lack of industry standards" effected your operations? If it's not against your company policy, it may help, in future, to know (a) what type of industry is this FAServer used? (b) how many FAServer and approximate total disk space? (c) which part of the world are this installed? (d) how important is standards based tools to your company and why you picked FAServer when they seems to be build on proprietary environment? (e) what is your performance and uptime experience with FAServers? (f) how critical is FAServer's uptime for your company/department's operation? (g) installed since when? (h) any experience you can share between FAServer and Auspex/SUN file servers? Thanking you all in anticipation. Philip Thomas Motorola - ACT, M/S M350 2200 W. Broadway M350 Mesa, AZ 85202 thomas(a)act.sps.mot.com rxjs80(a)email.sps.mot.com (602) 655-3678 (602) 655-2285 (fax)

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NetApp v Suns
by Dave Heiland 17 Jun '97

17 Jun '97

We're evaluating an F540 and I'm wondering how many of you compared them against the Suns. Specifically we currently run 2 Ultra 170's plus arrays which both see about 1200-1400 nfs ops/sec average with frequent peaks of 2000 on one. The one box holds common areas, the other builds. I'm considering upgrading these to 2 Ultra 2's with dual 300Mhz chips (for performance and arrays), or one F630 (200GB). >From what I can see of the LADDIS numbers, the NetApps respond faster than the Ultra 2 range and its not until you get to the Ultra 3000 that the response times are comparable, even though the Ultra 2's would sustain higher nfs ops. Is this something people have seen in practice? I'm initially considering one F630 for price reasons and since the one box sees higher nfs/ops but the other box is the one needing the extra storage. The 'limit' of 4500 nfs/ops on the F630 concerns me in that combining the current nfs ops can easily put use near the upper limit of the box. What I don't have a feel for is how many nfs ops the current workload would actually put on a filer. If it responds faster to clients, then I'd actually expect the nfs ops to be even higher, putting me even nearer the limit or above it (although I know its not limited to 4500 nfs/ops, I assume its response would drop significantly). Have people found this to be the case? Two F540's are a possibility, but we seem to be approaching their upper limit and if we go over there isn't room for expandability, whereas we could (eventually) add a second 630 and split the serving again if we choose to go this route. What kind of loading are people seeing on their netapps, e.g. 500nfs ops, 2000 nfs ops, any over the limit of the F540? Dave -- dheiland(a)lucent.com

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Re: Advice/suggestions
by sthaug＠nethelp.no 17 Jun '97

17 Jun '97

> The file service protocols are the obvious critical standards, but > there are many others that we support as well, including standards for > DNS, telnet, inetd, RPC, XDR, portmapper, lockd, NIS, ARP, RMT, rdate, > NDMP, syslog, SMTP, etc. Most (if not all) of these have RFCs > describing them. We support many of these in client-mode only, such as > NIS, DNS, SMTP, etc., because our goal is not to serve these protocols, > but to be a client to them in order to simplify administration. If NetApp claims to support SMTP, it would be nice if you could fix the bug where SMTP commands from a NetApp box are only terminated with LF, not CRLF as RFC 821 explicitly specifies. (I reported this on 12 March this year, and later heard that it was acknowledged as a bug, bug #4268.) Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug(a)nethelp.no

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Re: Third-party components for F210 and F230
by Cheena Srinivasan 16 Jun '97

16 Jun '97

At 09:06 PM 6/12/97 -0400, Brian Tao wrote: ->>_________ | Does someone have a Netapp-approved list of components that can be | used with the F210 and F230 filers without voiding service and support | warranties? NetApp publishes the "Product Configuration Guide" during every new product rollout that contains a section on supported 3rd-party peripherals. The only condition here is that we don't provide service or warrant those components that originate from outside of NetApp. Please contact your account manager for the latest version. A revised version is in the works and is expected to be made available within two weeks. An advantage of being an appliance company is that we use whatever processor technology that's best suited to serve the particular market segment. A disadvantage of having an agnostic view towards processor technology is that it does introduce more permutation/combination of peripheral technologies (for example, different memory types for Intel vs. Alpha) for testing and qualification efforts. I believe NetApp would have served our customers better if we put our focus in maintaining innovation in software, and innovate hardware for best reliability and performance. While the list of alternative peripheral components may not very extensive, we're doing our very best to give you that option should you desire to pursue that path. | The new filers use fast/wide drives (I heard that Fujitsu drives are | now on the approved list) and a different canister (metal instead of | plastic, for one thing). Does anyone have vendor and part numbers for Not true - we did test Fujitsu 9 GB, but NetApp provides support for Seagate Barracudas. _________<<- Regards, Cheena

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Re: Hello...
by mer＠world.evansville.net 13 Jun '97

13 Jun '97

Apologies if this is off the charter -- let me know (gently, please!) and I'll desist -- but I'm evaluating dedicated NFS servers and have narrowed things down to Network Appliance (F220, qty 2) versus Falcon Systems (FastfilePro 7000, qty 1). I must admit that I'm leaning toward the 7000 due to its superior expandability and greater administrative flexibility (multiple filesystems and RAID sets, ability to run old drives via JBOD on the SCSI port). Also, the 7000 tests about even with the F540 in various magazine reviews, and NetApp's own LADDIS testing shows the F220 to be only half as fast as the F540 (is this true in the real world?). On the other hand, NetApp tells me that the highly random nature of my traffic -- typical ISP work including email, USENET news, and webservers -- should point me toward multiple servers to maximize main memory cache hits. They say that the main memory cache on the 7000 will become worthless as I expand storage and that performance will drop off. I don't have a good feel for the importance of main memory cache here -- the 7000 uses hardware RAID controllers with onboard cache, so it seems like it would be less important to the Falcon product than it is to the NetApp line. But I must admit that NetApp's larger installed base -- 1000's versus 100's of systems -- makes it a safer choice on the surface. Anyone care to share his/her thoughts on this topic? -- Marc Rouleau VP and Chief Technology Officer Voice: (812) 479-1700 Fax: (812) 479-3439 World Connection Services, LLC http://www.evansville.net

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Re: Hello...
by fred.abounader＠vantis.com 13 Jun '97

13 Jun '97

Let me know via personal or newsgroup email if you are getting the performance you expect from the F220 and F330. What type of network are you on (10, 100, ATM, FDDI, etc)? ---} In enteract.private.lists.toasters, David Drum <david(a)more.net> wrote: ---} ---} > Brian Tao penned: ---} > ---} > > Just checking to see if anyone else is alive here... ;-) ---} > > ObInventory: got an F220, getting two F210's and an F230. :) ---} > ---} > Hi Brian, ---} > ---} > My F330 was delivered yesterday, and set up today (thanks Jeff West!). ---} ---} Me too. :)

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Third-party components for F210 and F230
by Brian Tao 13 Jun '97

13 Jun '97

Does someone have a Netapp-approved list of components that can be used with the F210 and F230 filers without voiding service and support warranties? I bought a minimally configured F220 a few months ago, and populated with third-party RAM from Kingston, Seagate Barracuda 4.3GB narrow SCSI drives, and DEC StorageWorks canisters. The total cost came out to 30% less than an identical system put together by Netapp. The new filers use fast/wide drives (I heard that Fujitsu drives are now on the approved list) and a different canister (metal instead of plastic, for one thing). Does anyone have vendor and part numbers for those components? Much as I love Netapp, I still find the pricing a wee bit steep. ;-) -- Brian Tao (BT300, taob(a)netcom.ca) "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"

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toasters