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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 _______________________________________________________________

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 ...

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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/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------

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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

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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 ...

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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

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