toasters

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13520 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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