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Re: ndmp copy?
by Mark D Simmons 02 Mar '98

02 Mar '98

NDMPCopy is a little bit creaky but allows you to control explicitly which directories get copied. It's very useful. When I say it's a bit creaky I mean I've observed some strange and uneven behaviours from it performance wise. It's never threatened our data though and so we still use it without qualms. We've also used the prototype technology Dave alluded to and that goes like the proverbial off a shovel! I think we were seeing 20+GB/hr between a F330 and an F520. It makes a full copy of a filer (ie we had to be careful to boot with the right OS floppy and such, one of the few times you have to care which CPU you're using) no more, no less. NDMPCopy has gone as fast as 2.5MB here, over FDDI, the prototype software boosted that to almost 5MB/s and we basically had a full filer copy in an hour and a half! Sorry this mail isn't very timely, but I hope it's useful to someone.

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Back-up software.
by Finnerty, Patrick [GAL:8041:EXCH] 28 Feb '98

28 Feb '98

I would like to hear what solutions people have implemented for backing up their Filers. We have a Breece Hill Q2.15 tape library (1 DLT 4000 drive and 14 slots). We are planning to have a look at BudTool, but at £10k-£15k it seems pretty expensive for something that swaps your tapes in and out and dumps data to them. Pat. Patrick Finnerty, Nortel, Mervue Business Park, Galway Phone: +353-91733658 FAX: +353-91756050 Email: galpf01(a)nortel.ie

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Re: Back-up software. [BudTool, Networker] [~long]
by Don Glascock 28 Feb '98

28 Feb '98

> I would like to hear what solutions people have implemented for backing > up their Filers. A very good question. We recently bought a small filer, an F230 max'ed out on drives, with plans over the next two years to fill it to capacity. We migrated file service to it from a DEC Alpha running Digital Unix. This mechanism worked well, but was starting to feel slow, and we wanted to add cleaner file service to our growing NT user base. Samba looked useful, but a bit scary in terms of support. We've been running DEC's version of Networker on the Alpha, and considered NFS-mounting the filer's disk space, which would allow us to continue on in that path. But loading the network at night was somewhat unattractive, though not much of a problem in our shop. Attaching our EXB-210 8mm jukebox with two drives directly to the filer looked more interesting, and BudTool seemed to be the best choice at the time, because of its ability to speak NDMP to our tape jukebox. Also, we have had problems with Networker's media and file databases, and BudTool promises to eliminate this problem. After getting BudTool in house, we discovered that configuring this package to suit our wishes was not going to be easy: configuration files are located together in one subdirectory, but they must be edited by hand (whereas Networker provided full gui's for everything), and many are called ".whatever", which of course is designed to hide these configuration files from casual "ls"'ing. Hiding configuration files in a permission-protected directory makes little sense to me, and was somewhat of a pain. Further, it took us a while to figure out how to configure the software to speak to the jukebox, and once that was done, we found that the few full backups we attempted would hang somewhere along the way for hours, after which they would wake up and keep going. Our network configuration is relatively simple-minded and I would describe it as very robust; none of the other ~50 devices on our network seemed to experience any problems at the same time that Networker was upset about something. The backups that did run smoothly failed to fill our tapes: our drives are (I think) 8505XL's, which do take the 7Gb/14Gb-compressed 160m 8mm tapes, yet Networker called them "full" after putting at most 4.5Gbytes on them. By this time our interest in BudTool was waning. When we tried file restores, we found that the recovery tool could list all of the instances of a given file to choose from, but the recovery window could not tell you which of three or four tapes in a full backup a given file was stored. When we timed backing up via BudTool versus Networker's NFS backups, we found that NFS was slightly faster in our level-0 tests than BudTool which was driving the filer-attached jukebox via NDMP. We were also told that many of the configuration problems we were experiencing resulted from the fact that we did not have a barcode reader in our jukebox. We investigated getting a barcode reader, but found that we would have to abandon our tape-naming schemes to support one of the many different label standards. While we've always known a barcode reader would speed up tape identification even in use with Networker, it had never been a big issue with us in the past. The folks at BudTool report that the tapes-not-filling problem could probably be fixed by adjusting some blocking-factor parameters buried in some of the config files. Perhaps this would also have improved speed of the backups. Also, there are rumors that if backups speak NDMP-1 instead of NDMP-2, they are less-likely to hang. In either case, these solutions seemed indicative of future problems: we never worried about blocking factor issues with Networker, and issues about reliability across protocol versions is definitely an unwelcome topic with respect something like backups which require resillience and sturdiness. Our problems with Networker surround the fact that neither DEC nor Legato presented us with a "care and feeding" document for their software. After doing a fair amount of digging, we have developed procedures that are run by cron to keep the databases in order and in good shape, so we have decided for now to stick with Networker. While we continue to use the automounter on our Unix systems, we added manual mounts to another directory on our Alpha through which the backups are made, and we added an entry to /sbin/{init.d,rc3.d} to issue these mounts at boot time, lest we back up empty mount points. Next year we hope to switch to another media for backups, and plan to check out the Veritas product, which is said to speak NDMP by that time. We would also like to see how BudTool changes over time to become easier to configure and use. The Networker product as sold through DEC that we are running on Digital Unix 3.2c is not Legato's most recent release by any means, so we would be interested in seeing that next year as well, though we keep hearing fluctuating timetables regarding their ETA for NDMP. Don Glascock -- Donald S. Glascock Mailstop GU-1016 Special Purpose Processor Development Group Mayo Foundation Rochester, MN 55905 Glascock.Donald(a)Mayo.EDU +1.507.284.1850 +1.507.284.9171 (fax) http://www.mayo.edu/sppdg/sppdg_home_page.html "No matter where you go, there you are."

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100BaseT Query - Experiences?
by beepy＠netapp.com 26 Feb '98

26 Feb '98

I was wondering if it was against the rules to ask this alias about their experience with 100BaseT and filers. 1. What switch do you use? 2. What clients do you use on 100BaseT? 3. What filer and how much disk and NVRAM? 4. If you have ever done performance tests against the filer, what type of tests are you running, and roughly what results are you seeing? 5. Are you running with autonegotiation on: (1) filer (2) clients (break out by vendor as necessary) If you disabled auto-negotiation, why? What were the symptoms? 6. Have you experimented with half and full duplex and matching end to end? 7. Has anyone engaged in or worked with a client vendor in client-side tuning? What was your experience? 8. How many are looking at moving in the future to installing on the filer: (1) ATM (2) Gigabit Ethernet (3) FDDI :-) I'll try to pitch in my experiences after some feedback. I hate affecting the experiment too much. Oh yeah, I almost forgot! subscribe toasters beepy

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lists@mathworks.com
by Mike Bosch 24 Feb '98

24 Feb '98

subscribe ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Mike Bosch Regional Manager Network Appliance Australia - New Zealand Phone: 61-41-728-7345 Email: mbosch(a)netapp.com ********************************************************************* FAST SIMPLE RELIABLE MULTI-PROTOCOL Forbes "200 Best Small Companies" PC Week "Ferrari of File Servers" ********************************************************************* ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------

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Re: Snapshot behavior
by Daniel Quinlan 22 Feb '98

22 Feb '98

Arnie Thompson <arnie(a)netapp.com> writes: > When you delete files, the space formerly accounted for in the active file > system now gets accounted for in the .snapshot area. Snapshot space > consumed grows as you delete or modify files, and the more you change the > larger the snapshot area becomes; think of snapshots as measuring the > "delta" in a file system. It would really be great if there was a snapshot deletion daemon that could delete the oldest standard (hourly, nightly, and weekly snapshots only) snapshot(s) when the snapshot usage goes above a certain number. So, "snap" could do a "snap highwatermark" command or something like that in a similar manner to the "snap reserve" command. - Dan

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Anyone using third party drives/shelves
by Marc Nicholas 21 Feb '98

21 Feb '98

Subject says it all: anyone doing it? Any success or horror stories? Any caveats? TIA. -marc -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Hippocampus OSD, Inc. "Industrial Strength Internet Solutions" vox://416.979.9000 fax://416.979.8223 http://www.hippocampus.net

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User list
by pwilson＠pdc.com 20 Feb '98

20 Feb '98

I would like to be included on the user list. _/_/_/_/ _/_/_/_/ _/_/ Paul J. Wilson _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ Federal Rep _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/ 610-265-3300 x125 _/ _/ _/ _/ 610-265-2165 FAX _/ _/_/_/_/ _/_/_/ email: pwilson(a)pdc.com

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Re: Snapshot behavior
by Arnie Thompson 20 Feb '98

20 Feb '98

Hi Mike, When you delete files, the space formerly accounted for in the active file system now gets accounted for in the .snapshot area. Snapshot space consumed grows as you delete or modify files, and the more you change the larger the snapshot area becomes; think of snapshots as measuring the "delta" in a file system. Eventually the Netapp will free up space as the snapshots expire. If you need the space back right now you can delete snapshots manually via console commands. Do a "snap list" at the console to obtain a list of snapshots, and you'll get an idea of which snapshots are taking up the most space. Generally you want to start deleting the oldest snapshots first. You can delete one or more snapshots by using the "snap delete <snapshot name>" command, which will return space to the active filesystem as long as your overall snapshot utilization exceeds 100% of the snapshot reserve. This sounds a little complicated, but do a "df" on the filer after each snapshot deletion and check out the effect on active and snapshot utilization percentages. Regards, Arnie At 08:54 AM 2/20/98 -0800, Mike Mueller wrote: >We are moving a large amount of files onto our NetApp but first we had to >delete a lot of files to make space for the new files. As the files are >being deleted, the .snapshot is growing and seemingly there will not be >enough space for the new files and the now bloated .snapshot. We're kind of >new at this but we so far have not been able to verify that the space >seemingly taken up by the bloated .snapshot will be released as needed to >make room for the new files. > >Will the NetApp release space from .snapshot to make room for new files, or >do we need to somehow manually get rid of the .snapshot? > >Sorry if this is a dumb question but the move is currently running and I'm >not sure that I'll be able to find the answer before the NetApp runs out of >space. > >Thanks, > >-- Mike > > > > >

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Re: ndmp copy?
by Daniel Quinlan 20 Feb '98

20 Feb '98

Dave Hitz <hitz(a)netapp.com> writes: > The NetApp sales engineers have a tool that is much faster than NDMP > copy, and which -- I believe -- does maintain snapshots. You might > want to contact an SE. > > (Yes -- the tool I'm describing will be integrated back into our base > software. What the SE's have is an early proto-type.) Ummm, will it allow you to do partial copies (one directory hierarchy like ndmpcopy does) and copies from differently-sized filers? Dan

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