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Re: NetApp burn-in testing (was "raid swap question")
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

Another test, that has been talked about by Netapp before but which Dave didn't mention, is in-house production testing. Almost every new software release, hardware model, and new feature (like ATM) gets time in production use in Netapp's own "Real World" corporate network, often within Engineering itself. While not specifically a QA function, Netapp does integrate it's own products into their infrastructure as best as possible and such rollouts have proven to be very fruitful at identifying problems and correcting them before they reach the customers. Bruce

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Re: backing up large filers
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

>As for stackers directly attached to the filers, what have folks found >that works? When we first tried this (long ago with an ADIC DLT 2500xt >"stacker"), we found that the stacker mechanism was quite lousy and tended >to hang. Thus we had to reboot the filer to "un-hang" the stacker. I >have stayed away from diretly connected drives since. I used directly attached DLT-4700s at Netapp and never had one with a hung stacker mechanism. If the UNIX host firing off the dump over rsh died, it *could* leave the dump/drive hung and thus requiring a reboot of the filer to fix, but that was rare. Bruce

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Re: raid swap question
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

On 11/04/97 07:02:23 you wrote: > We have a bunch of filers sitting idle waiting for some >back-ordered components, so I've taken the opportunity to "stress" >them and see what breaks. ;-) On a quiet filer (no exports), I >started with a two-disk configuration (it doesn't seem to mind having >only one parity and one data disk) and hot-plugged four more drives in >rapid succession without a `raid swap'. > > The usual warnings on the first write to a new disk were logged, >but then the filer complained about all three SCSI buses (only 9a was >in use at the time). Beyond that there were no other difficulties. Of course, you may have just been lucky. Under different circumstances or configurations it could very easily hang or crash your filer. Don't try this at home, folks (well, at least not until it's supported). You'll note that it had to reset the adapater and the bus to try and regain a sense of sanity. Bruce

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Re: backing up large filers
by mds46523＠ggr.co.uk 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

Currently about 700GB's using dump/restore on 6 F330's and F540 and 2 F630's. Judicious snapshotting, decent DLT stackers directly attached to the filers and a reliable admin host mean all but the one F540 (with 200GB totally filled) easily backup overnight - the F540 finishes mid-morning. We've spoken with folk from NetApp who seem to be doing exciting things in the labs, related to faster backups (hopefully more manageable ones, with fast restores too, but I'll take what I can get). Veritas claim they'll support NDMP in one of the next two releases (they do two per year). We're trying to decide upon a backup solution across a large slice of our infrastructure, several flavours of Unix, maybe NT as well, and the filers too (for preference)...Legato and Openvision are still in the running, but Legato has two major demerits: no planned NDMP support and they change the atime values on files during backup and don't rest them! Which is infuriating because backup isn't 'normal use' and you need to know the age of files to be able to make sensible decisions to manage them! 2p or not 2p, yah, let's break the bank. On Nov 13, 9:02, sirbruce(a)ix.netcom.com wrote: > Subject: Re: backing up large filers > On 11/13/97 00:02:12 you wrote: > >dump makes for a fairly poor backup management solution. Ever try to > >maintain ~30 filers with around 600GB? We kinda found that our home > >grown scripts we're scaling to where we needed to be and found it > >increasinly harder to manage the whole mess. > > Well, I admit, not 30. :) But hundreds of gigabytes, yes. The only > real problem in terms of scalability was long restore times; that could > be solved by breaking the backups into smaller chunks. But with > snapshots the need for restores was very rare; I could see how this > could easly be a more frequent need in a different environment. > > Bruce > >-- End of excerpt from sirbruce(a)ix.netcom.com -- -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 mds46523＠ggr.co.uk 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

Re: lots of interesting stuff from everybody about quotas. On our toasters we have a huge mess called 'home directories' and another huge mess called 'project areas'. We've glass-walled these various areas with qtrees, thus making ersatz filesystems that behave to clients exactly like filesystems except to the filer and admin host. However, many users 'live' and 'work' in the same areas as each other, so a qtree quota on the filer wouldn't necessarily map to any one user's quota. In fact quite the reverse. Quotas, in the Unixy sense are distinct from this, because they would report information about each numeric uid's usage of space in a given filesystem and so would have to be specified in a table for each qtree, mapping: uid->(soft, hard, timelimit, timeleft {, any other useful stuff}) It would be a nice interface-feature to be able to harness qtree quotas to filer-wide quotas, or even groups-of-filers-wide quotas, but only on demand (!) as the control of each qtree quota table would be more generally useful. Perhaps users could be given default quotas for all qtrees on a filer until they appear in specific tables which override the defaults. The provision of soft and hard quotas per qtree for defined sets of uid's would be a real admin bonus for us. BTW I was under the impression that a machine hosting a quota'd filesystem locally and serving NFS, was able to deny space to a client that didn't observe quotas if a transaction would breach the quota conditions..? I think I need to go find out some more, as this sounds reasonable but doesn't gel with what others have prior to this on this discussion. How quotas per user under NFS would map to CIFS quota'ing (does such a beast exist?) I've no idea yet, though I can see a clear need to have the two work synergistically. (Users who flit from Unix to PC and back using all the same files at the same time make life interesting that way). (dang, another 2p gone) -- -Mark, TSG Unix admin and support, int 782 4412, ext +44 1438 76 4412. ... an Englishman in London ...

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Re: backing up large filers
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

On 11/13/97 00:02:12 you wrote: >dump makes for a fairly poor backup management solution. Ever try to >maintain ~30 filers with around 600GB? We kinda found that our home >grown scripts we're scaling to where we needed to be and found it >increasinly harder to manage the whole mess. Well, I admit, not 30. :) But hundreds of gigabytes, yes. The only real problem in terms of scalability was long restore times; that could be solved by breaking the backups into smaller chunks. But with snapshots the need for restores was very rare; I could see how this could easly be a more frequent need in a different environment. Bruce

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Re: backing up large filers
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

On 11/12/97 15:53:59 you wrote: >Any ideas? We're all pretty frustrated at the lack of a solid backup >solution from Network Appliance. Hell, I'd go for something proprietary >so long as it worked! Straight dump and restore works well, IF you have one of the latest versions of the software... at least then if there is a problem, Budtool won't be involved and you can address the bug right to Netapp. I'm not sure why you'd be having so much trouble with Budtool, though. Bruce ]

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Re: backing up large filers
by Lars Wean 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

Hi, > > Has anyone found a "good" solution to backing up large filers? No.... > > Someone convinced me that this ndmp thing was the way to go and I bought > into the whole BudTool scheme (since they're the only ones supporting > ndmp). I have an issue with that too - only one vendor. > NetApp tried with us too... > However, it's been nothing but a disaster and I'm looking for something > far better. We've gotten the impression that no one at PDC has bothered > to test BudTool with large filers with BreeceHill stackers (PDC and > NetApp recommeneded these to us). There appears to be a general lack of > interopibility. And finger pointing between Network Appliance and PDC. > > Right now we have an issue that keeps rebooting our filers every few > days. > > Don't even talk about restoring data... as part of our general backup > policy, we do periodic restores. I believe the wording from PDC was > something to the effect that BudTool is a backup management software and > not geared towards restores. Suffice it to say that we rarely have a > successful restore. > > I'm basically fishing for alternative backup solutions. We have three > F540s with ~100GB disk and about 20 other boxes with ~50GB or so each, > all code development and all needs to be backed up. > > Any ideas? We're all pretty frustrated at the lack of a solid backup > solution from Network Appliance. Hell, I'd go for something proprietary > so long as it worked! My best solution is based on using Legato Networker 5.02, running on Solaris 2.6 2 CPUx 200MHz Ultra with 256 MByte of memory, and 2 x 100Mbit ethernet interfaces against the filers.The tape drives are 2 x DLT7000 in a 10 slot jukebox. The filers contains about 5 million files, using 192 Gbyte of data. Occasional restores never failed us, online file indexes has 1 month of history. A restore of a single file usually takes about 5 minutes, including overhead in mounting tapes. A disaster recovery takes *far* to long, but the potential for restoring files to something other than NetApp is promising, I can restore a full saveset of 100GByte in 6 hours ( to /dev/null, or scanning in files not contained in the online index) Needless to say, we are looking into something else..... Best Regards, Lars Wean

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Re: Experiences with CIFS
by sirbruce＠ix.netcom.com 13 Nov '97

13 Nov '97

On 11/12/97 16:13:05 you wrote: >I have answered this question many times, and I am sick of it. Hey, you don't have to convince *me*. I didn't mean it as a personal attack. But I do know it has been a source of confusion. As you see yourself, different people here had different expectations. So perhaps it's not quite as obvious as it seems? >Go onto your own SunOS or Solaris system and try it yourself, soft >quotas have been around for a very long time and so far, I have not >heard a single technical reason why it should not work. My investigations into this tell me they work much like Guy Harris says. Do you agree with his assessment? If your version of soft quotas differs, in what way does it differ? Does your SunOS system report you as over soft quota over NFS as soon as it happens? I'm only trying to facilitate the questions and answers here. >FreeBSD does it, shoddy Linux does it, hell, I can't name a unix >system off the top of my head that doesn't. > >Is it so much to ask? What would a Netapp implementation do, other than report a "time left" or somesuch in the field reported via the quota command? Bruce

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Re: Experiences with CIFS
by Rajiv Khemani 12 Nov '97

12 Nov '97

>I'm considering a F230 with CIFS support to replace several creaking >NT file servers which are being used in a SW development environment. > ... >I note from the netapp site that Windows Networking Software 2.0 is >out, but I quote from the FAQ: > >" The next release of Windows Networking Software will also provide >NTFS-style file and directory permissions for Windows users." > >This is what was said about version 1.0 > >Q to Netapp people on the list (yes, I have asked directly a week or >2 ago and am still awaiting a reply ) > > When can file level ACLs be expected? Garrett, I apologize for the delayed response. Just like the FAQ says, NTFS-style file and directory level ACLs will be available in the next release of Windows Networking Software. This is the first time we have publically said this, and are working hard to deliver on it. We expect that this functionality will be available in the first half of 1998. Rajiv Khemani Group Marketing Manager Network Appliance > I know having file level ACLs is more complex to manage, but it does >allow us to have multiple groups with different ranges of access >(which stops the Analysts & Business people deleting/changing the >developers work and project teams to have read access to other teams >work) > >Even directory level ACLs would go a long way to meeting our >requirements, but I think that if netapp is serious about the CIFS >market then they need to duplicate the NT ACLs on the filers. > >Thanks, >GB > > >-- >Garrett Burke, Network Admin,Managed Solutions Corp. >32 Upper Mount St., Dublin, Ireland. >burkeg(a)msc.ie +353-1-661-4840 >A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou. > > ---- Rajiv Khemani Group Marketing Manager Network Appliance, Inc. Direct: 408-367-3758 Fax: 408-367-3151 HTTP: http://www.netapp.com

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