toasters

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13531 discussions

Re: Considering buying an F330
by Steve Gremban 31 Mar '97

31 Mar '97

1) Minimizing downtime was one of our major requirements. That includes downtime due to admin tasks like patch installs and OS upgrades as well as downtime due to hardware malfunction. Fast boot time (2 minutes or so) is ensured by keeping a snapshot of the filesystem in NVRAM and journaling nfs requests that arrived since the snapshot. If the system is shut off without halting, upon bootup it will write the snapshot from NVRAM and run the journaled nfs requests guaranteeing a consistent filesystem. You don't need to run "fsck" or some other filesystem consistency checker which can take a long time to run. Most patch installs and OS upgrades are easy: untar, download, and reboot takes all of 5 minutes. The toaster has raid4 to protect against disk failure. A disk is the most likely component to fail. When a disk dies the system runs in degraded mode and your filesystem is at risk from another disk failure. The toaster can be configured for a hot spare so that raid redundancy can be restored quickly and automatically. 2) Snapshots when used correctly can save alot of time and wasted effort. If your data is created and deleted and recreated etc. etc. recurrently such as doing edit/compile/run or when running simulations over and over with incremental changes then snapshots are not a good thing. They will take over all available filesystem space (caveat: depends on how often snapshots are done, the size of your filesystem, and the amount of data that is created/deleted/changed). I restrict the data going to our toasters to that created interactively by our designers using Cadence. An IC design database may have 6 or more people working in it and if a cell disappears or the database becomes corrupted (for any of a million reasons) we only lose at most a few hours of effort by copying back a previous hourly from snapshots. We have the following policy: "snap sched 2 6 12", 2 weeklies, 6 nightlys, and 12 hourlies. regards, Steve Gremban gremban(a)ti.com

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Re: Considering buying an F330
by Steve Gremban 31 Mar '97

31 Mar '97

I use the default 20% value for snapshot reserve. On an F330 our setup looks like this: 10 disks data (35.2 GB) 2 disks snapshots (8.8 GB) 1 disk parity 1 disk hot swap. Snapshot reserve usage stays about 20% to 50% except when the toaster gets full. As Jim Davis says in his message: >This has been a sticky problem with our F220. We currently use the >default schedule in the sysadmin guide, more or less, and that means >once you get close to running out of disk space you have a problem >-- deleting files just shuffles them from the filesystem to >.snapshot, so there's no net savings in disk space. And the >.snapshot space will cheerfully spill over the 20% default. In our case you can delete 8.8GB of data in a 2 week period (we keep 2 weekly snapshots) and see an 8.8GB increase in user free space. If you delete anything beyond 8.8GB you will not see any further increase in user free space. The 8.8GB snapshot reserve has been sufficient for us on toasters where I have restricted the type of data to interactive design databases. The toaster that I allowed simulations on could only run a few hourly and 1 nightly snapshot. regards, Steve Gremban gremban(a)ti.com ------------- Begin Forwarded Message ------------- On Mon, 31 Mar 1997, Steve Gremban wrote: > I restrict the data going to our toasters to that created > interactively by our designers using Cadence. An IC design > database may have 6 or more people working in it and if a cell > disappears or the database becomes corrupted (for any of a > million reasons) we only lose at most a few hours of effort by > copying back a previous hourly from snapshots. > > We have the following policy: "snap sched 2 6 12", 2 > weeklies, 6 nightlys, and 12 hourlies. what is your snap reserve set at, may i ask? Tom Yates - Unix Chap - The Mathworks, Inc. ------------- End Forwarded Message -------------

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How does a Netapp toaster keep time?
by craig Rodrigues 31 Mar '97

31 Mar '97

Hi, I just got a Netapp box installed where I work, and the damn thing doesn't keep time properly. For some reason, the Netapp time keeps setting itself 2 hours behind the current system time. (We have a bunch of Solaris boxes mounting the Netapp). The sysadmin who looks after it in my office claims that Netapp tech support told him that the only why to correctly set the time is to type rdate on the Netapp box!!! This seems fishy to me because even after our sysadmin does this, the Netapp seems to drift back to 2 hours behind the current system time (of our Sun boxes). Any ideas? -- Craig Rodrigues craigr(a)gis.net

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Re: How does a Netapp toaster keep time?
by sthaug＠nethelp.no 31 Mar '97

31 Mar '97

> I just got a Netapp box installed where I work, > and the damn thing doesn't keep time properly. > For some reason, the Netapp time keeps setting itself > 2 hours behind the current system time. Sounds like a time zone problem. > The sysadmin who looks after it in my office claims that Netapp tech > support told him that the only why to correctly set the time > is to type rdate on the Netapp box!!! I haven't found any other way either. Not that rdate is a big deal, but I'd like to have it run regularly, *without* enabling rsh access to the NetApp. I'd like ntp even better, of course :-) Btw, our F330 is about 30 secs fast after 14 days of uptime. Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug(a)nethelp.no

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Re: Considering buying an F330
by David Drum 31 Mar '97

31 Mar '97

David Drum penned: > If you the choice to make again, would you buy another Network > Appliance, or would you get the biggest disk array you could find for > the same money? Why? Thanks for all your replies. I didn't expect the responses to be any different, really. Regards, David -- "That man has a rare gift for obfuscation." -- ST:DS9 * "It's hard to be bored when you're as stupid as a line." -- Vernor Vinge * "Reality has a tendency to be so uncomfortably real." -- Neil Peart * "You can only measure the size of your head from the inside." -- Larry Wall

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Anybody else have a F210? (black cover)
by Meng Chua 31 Mar '97

31 Mar '97

Just wondering if anyone else out ther has a F210, Black cover. We have one, and its working out great for our needs. Just wondering if anyone knows why the sales dept does not publich this product. Meng Chua meng(a)beamtech.com

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Re: Considering buying an F330
by kls＠netapp.com 29 Mar '97

29 Mar '97

> > If you the choice to make again, would you buy another Network > > Appliance, or would you get the biggest disk array you could > > find for the same money? Why? > > *provided i needed RAID5*, that's a no-brainer. it's noticeably better > than any of the other RAID5 offerings i've tried, and likely cheaper than > RAID0+1 with anyone's discs and arrays. Thanks for the kind words! However, lest anyone get too confused, our filers use RAID-4, not RAID-5. Still parity and the same degree of data protection, just on one disk instead of being interleaved amongst all disks as RAID-5 does. The advantage of RAID-5 is that you can use a traditional file system, designed for a single disk and not for RAID, and distribute the parity workload amongst the disks instead of it being focused on one disk. NetApp uses a file system designed for RAID to avoid the parity disk bottleneck. RAID-4 has the advantage of allowing you to expand the RAID group (even by just one disk), and of using disks of varying geometry in the same RAID group. RAID-5 requires all disks to have the same geometry and cannot itself be expanded, though you can expand the filesystem by concatenating an additional RAID group (not just one disk, and more space is lost to parity). -- Karl

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Re: Considering buying an F330
by Caroline Brossi Yates 28 Mar '97

28 Mar '97

> > *provided i needed RAID5*, that's a no-brainer. it's noticeably better > than any of the other RAID5 offerings i've tried, and likely cheaper than DEC makes a screamingly fast RAID 5 box... > RAID0+1 with anyone's discs and arrays. administration interface, > snapshots, ease of dumping and nice blue faceplate (just kidding) are all > factors for me, too. Service is also an important factor, which NetApp is +very+ adept at. David, if you buy F330s, though, make sure they send you BLUE NettApp tee-shirts. We bought a pair of F330s last fall and are still waiting for ours. Maybe their sales department needs to take lessons from their support department... ho hum! -Caroline

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Considering buying an F330
by David Drum 28 Mar '97

28 Mar '97

Hello anyone and everyone, I found the article announcing this list on comp.protocols.nfs via Deja News. Rather than lurk for a while, I need to jump right in and ask a leading question: If you the choice to make again, would you buy another Network Appliance, or would you get the biggest disk array you could find for the same money? Why? We're about to buy an F330, and I am in search of decision reassurance. I can't help but think I am splurging some. Regards, David K. Drum david(a)more.net -- "That man has a rare gift for obfuscation." -- ST:DS9 * "It's hard to be bored when you're as stupid as a line." -- Vernor Vinge * "Reality has a tendency to be so uncomfortably real." -- Neil Peart * "You can only measure the size of your head from the inside." -- Larry Wall

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non-F toasters
by Tom Yates 21 Mar '97

21 Mar '97

is there anyone out there who's still got non F-series toasters? particularly, has anyone got 450s? 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

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Re: "DU" lying on sunos5 machines
by Amy Chused 20 Mar '97

20 Mar '97

It's 'cuz Solaris du counts blocks, not K, and the netapp blocks are 16K, not 1/2 K. I think there's an option to du to tell it how big the bloody blocks are or to make it count K, not blocks. 'Course, if I remember correctly, that option is broken in the stock install, but there's a patch available from sun that fixes it, I think. Amy -- answering off the top of her head, with an answer worth what you paid for it. At 10:40 AM 3/20/97 -0600, Jim Fondren wrote: >I sent the following report to support but also wanted to ask the >user community about this... > >The unix "du" command is lying to me on Sunos5 machines... > >sanantonio: ll arc >-rw-rw-rw- 1 rich users 1053700 Aug 12 1996 arc > >sanantonio: du -sk arc >65 arc > >sanantonio: /files/home/jim/ftp/fileutils-3.16/src/du -sk arc >65 arc > >sanantonio: uname -a >SunOS sanantonio 5.5 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-1 > > >A Sunos4 box says... > >[dallas] ll arc >-rw-rw-rw- 1 rich users 1053700 Aug 12 1996 arc >[dallas] du -s arc >2072 arc >[dallas] uname -a >SunOS dallas 4.1.3_U1 1 sun4m >Any known work-arounds? I checked NETAPPs' FAQ and didn't see anything. > >My Netapps box is a F220... NetApp Release 4.0a: Wed Oct 16 05:03:33 PDT 1996

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DU Lying to me on Sunos5 (last word)
by Jim Fondren 20 Mar '97

20 Mar '97

Hello again, Just a last update on my problem with DU which has now been happily resolved. :-) The patch for sol 2.5 (2.5.1 includes it) is now up to 103477-07. I'm mirroring it at ftp.cartotech.com/pub/sunpatch/103477-07.tar.gz Symptoms are DU returning erroneous info on filesystems mounted from a NETAPP device using NFS V3. Thanks, Jim F CARTOTECH

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"DU" lying on sunos5 machines
by Jim Fondren 20 Mar '97

20 Mar '97

Hello, I sent the following report to support but also wanted to ask the user community about this... The unix "du" command is lying to me on Sunos5 machines... sanantonio: ll arc -rw-rw-rw- 1 rich users 1053700 Aug 12 1996 arc sanantonio: du -sk arc 65 arc sanantonio: /files/home/jim/ftp/fileutils-3.16/src/du -sk arc 65 arc sanantonio: uname -a SunOS sanantonio 5.5 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-1 A Sunos4 box says... [dallas] ll arc -rw-rw-rw- 1 rich users 1053700 Aug 12 1996 arc [dallas] du -s arc 2072 arc [dallas] uname -a SunOS dallas 4.1.3_U1 1 sun4m Any known work-arounds? I checked NETAPPs' FAQ and didn't see anything. My Netapps box is a F220... NetApp Release 4.0a: Wed Oct 16 05:03:33 PDT 1996 Thanks, ----------------------- Jim.Fondren(a)PoBox.Com --------------------------- Jim Fondren Unix Systems and GIS Programming jim(a)cartotech.com CARTOTECH 210-657-1500 11900 Crownpoint Suite 100 San Antonio, TX 78233 USA NO UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL EMAIL - NO EXCEPTIONS

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DU lying on sunos5 machines (update)
by Jim Fondren 20 Mar '97

20 Mar '97

Thankyou to all that responded. Your hints let met get closer to a solution. http://puma.join.ad.jp/tech/faq-e/sun/solaris2/Q5.51.html ...contains a related reference and mentions a patch to 2.5, 103226 (SPARC). Apparently solaris 2.5.1 doesn't have this bug (and I verified that on one of my 2.5.1 boxes). Thanks again, ----------------------- Jim.Fondren(a)PoBox.Com --------------------------- Jim Fondren Unix Systems and GIS Programming jim(a)cartotech.com CARTOTECH 210-657-1500 11900 Crownpoint Suite 100 San Antonio, TX 78233 USA

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Re: "DU" lying on sunos5 machines
by Ketil Kirkerud 20 Mar '97

20 Mar '97

Jim Fondren <jim(a)cartotech.com> writes: > > Hello, > > I sent the following report to support but also wanted to ask the > user community about this... > > The unix "du" command is lying to me on Sunos5 machines... Theis is a known bug in SunOS 5.? Their nfs client/server code has a bug in it that makes du report wrongly. There are patches available. (I can't remember offhand what their IDs are, though) regards, ---Ketil Kirkerud, Scandinavia Online

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Write operations using NFS v2?
by Ragnar Lonn 18 Mar '97

18 Mar '97

Hello, Thought I'd try out this list in the hope of sharing some info with others as opposed to bugging NetApp support only for my own sake ;) (but I'll CC them at least) I'm setting up an F540 as a newsspool NFS server. That is, I will store Usenet news articles on it. A handful of machines will mount the filesystem read-only and these machines will accept user newsreader connections. Then I will have one single machine that mount the filesystem read/write - it will be the machine that stores incoming articles and removes old ones from the filer. Now, for news I've got the advice to use NFS v2 because clients using v3 issue the readdir+ operation unique to v3 and this operation does some extra stuff (as opposed to v2's readdir) that most applications take advantage of but news software (INN nnrpd) has no use of the extra data returned by readdir+ and this makes it a performance loss to use v3 in this particular case. But... I've read that NFS writes are much faster in NFS v3 than v2. This, of course, leads me to my question (ta-daa) : Actually, I'll make it two questions. If the anser to the first one is no, the second one is not so interesting anymore ;) 1. Are write operations slower on a NetApp server if you use NFS v2 compared to when you're using NFS v3? (and if so, about how much does it differ?) 2. (if the answer to the above question was 'yes') Could I leave the option "nfs.v3.enable" ON, on the NetApp and mount the filesystem from the reader clients using e.g "mount -o vers=2,proto=udp" (can't remember the exact syntax) while at the same time, from the client that is supposed to be doing a lot of *writing* to the NetApp, mount using version 3 to speed up the writes? This machine won't be running nnrpd so it won't be doing any readdir+ in vain. Regards, /Ragnar, Algonet

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Re: Write operations using NFS v2?
by sthaug＠nethelp.no 18 Mar '97

18 Mar '97

> Maybe this doesn't matter much if there's no performance advantage > in general to using v3 instead of v2 of course... Then there's > no reason for me to bother about v3 at all as I'm only going to > use the NetApp as a newsspool host and nothing else. I'm going to turn off v3 on our NetApp box tonight, just to see how much of a difference it makes. Another thing I've been wondering about is options.minra. I find the documentation a bit thin, shall we say. If the 'aggressive read ahead' mentioned in the documentation is *per file*, it's probably a good thing for a NetApp used as a News spool - since you normally retrieve a whole article at a time. If the read ahead is based on something other than file, I'm not so sure. Anybody played with minra on a NetApp news spool? Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug(a)nethelp.no

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Re: NFS v2 works okay, but statvfs won't tell me about inodes
by sthaug＠nethelp.no 17 Mar '97

17 Mar '97

> > I can of course telnet to the NetApp and check the number of inodes > > directly, but I'd like to do it from the Solaris box which feeds the > > NetApp with news articles. Any good suggestions? > > I ran into the situation running inn on our Solaris machine, because it > tries to do a df -i on the spool directory. They changed df so that it > won't allow -i at all on an NFS mounted filesystem! I never tried a > statvfs call directly to see if that would work... I had assumed it > wouldn't work for v3 either. Well, it does - as long as you call statvfs directly with your own program, of course. > I just commented out the df -i check in inn and made sure I had enough > inodes on the filer. I didn't pick a *huge* value, but about double what > I needed. Yes, this is what I'm currently doing. Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug(a)nethelp.no

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NFS v2 significantly faster for News expire
by sthaug＠nethelp.no 17 Mar '97

17 Mar '97

I switched our NetApp box to NFS v2 last night, and it *does* make a difference. It's a bit early to draw firm conclusions after only one expire run, but so far it looks like I cut my expire time with a whole hour. Nice! It's particularly noticeable during the 'fastrm' and 'renumber' phases. Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug(a)nethelp.no

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NFS v2 works okay, but statvfs won't tell me about inodes
by sthaug＠nethelp.no 17 Mar '97

17 Mar '97

Today I switched our F330 from NFS v3 to v2, since it's being used as a News spool and can't really do anything useful with the extra NFS v3 info. I got a nasty surprise when I found out that the Solaris 2.5.1 statvfs system call no longer returned number of inodes. In fact the fields u_long f_files; /* total # of file nodes (inodes) */ u_long f_ffree; /* total # of free file nodes */ u_long f_favail; /* # of free nodes avail to non-superuser */ are all set to 4294967295 (ie. -1) on return from statvfs. When I was using NFS v3, these fields had sensible values on return from the call. I can of course telnet to the NetApp and check the number of inodes directly, but I'd like to do it from the Solaris box which feeds the NetApp with news articles. Any good suggestions? Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug(a)nethelp.no

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Re: head count
by sthaug＠nethelp.no 13 Mar '97

13 Mar '97

> how does one test for a shortage of NVRAM? Run 'sysstat 1'. If the writes are spaced out (there are intervals with no writes), you probably have enough NVRAM. If you have continuous writes, you probably need more NVRAM. Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug(a)nethelp.no

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head count
by Tom Yates 13 Mar '97

13 Mar '97

anyone here using a toaster to serve /var/spool/mail, including to a mail gateway machine (ie, not just for reading)? any comments thereon? particularly, what flavour of toaster, how configured, and roughly how many mail users. 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 by the way, hello and welcome to all toaster owners out there. also to the many people from netapp who've subscribed to this list, for which, many thanks. hopefully this will be an information conduit without being a high-volume pain-in-the-bum.

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Re: head count (fwd)
by Tom Yates 13 Mar '97

13 Mar '97

forwarded with permission ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 12:38:36 -0600 From: christopher williams <cgw(a)yoyodyne.io.com> To: Tom Yates <madhatta(a)mathworks.com> Cc: christopher williams <cgw(a)io.com> Subject: Re: head count No, but I'd sure *like* to. I had plans to get an F220 to replace the Solstice ODS software-raid system we're using for mail now. We currently support 5700+ users (with a SS10 that has a 125mHz HyperSparc, and 3 pop/imap servers that mount the mail spool from the mailhub). Those plans got ixnayed (due to money concerns, feh!) and now we're looking at getting an ALR PPro 200mHz running Solaris x86 with one of ALR's recommended hardware raid cards. Definitely _definitely_ not my choice. *sigh* I didn't reply to the list 'cos this prolly wouldn't be very useful to them. I just thought I'd reply to give my support for the idea; I don't know how well it works, but I suspect that it will work *very* well!!! I'd go with an F220 at the minimum, unless you can afford the 330 already (they're trivial to upgrade, so buying an F220 is a cheaper alternative). Depending on how many users you're going to have, I'd also recommend getting 4mb NVRAM. -cgw- -- christopher williams 512.462.0999 fall seven times cgw(a)io.com sen sys eng fnord stand up eight In message <Pine.GSO.3.95.970226112407.19938G-100000@sproing>, you write: > anyone here using a toaster to serve /var/spool/mail, including to a mail > gateway machine (ie, not just for reading)? > > any comments thereon? particularly, what flavour of toaster, how > configured, and roughly how many mail users.

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Re: head count
by Andrew Hobson 12 Mar '97

12 Mar '97

On Wed, 12 Mar 1997 12:31:08 -0500 (EST), Tom Yates <madhatta(a)mathworks.com> said: > anyone here using a toaster to serve /var/spool/mail, including to a mail > gateway machine (ie, not just for reading)? We're using a scheme similar to the qmail maildir format to store the mail (each message in a different file in the user's directory) so that we don't have to worry about file locking via NFS. All access is via POP. > any comments thereon? particularly, what flavour of toaster, how > configured, and roughly how many mail users. We are using a F540 with 256MB of cache and about 36GB of disk. We have two 500 Mhz Alphas and one PPro 200 as MX machines doing about 700,000 messages a day to over 100,000 mail users. Two 500 Mhz Alphas run pop daemons. Works like a dream. Drew -- "Joe, release me from your Kung-Fu grip." -- Stacy Lavelle

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Video
by Paul Ryan 06 Mar '97

06 Mar '97

Does anybody have experience using the NetApp box to server Video thanks

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