I have two filers in a remote office (the Philippines, while we are 
located in Dallas).  One of these filers, FILER1, authenticates to the 
local domain, let's call it LOCAL, and the other, FILER2, authenticates 
back to our domain, let's call it CENTRAL.  There is a trust between the 
LOCAL and the CENTRAL domains so users from either domain can log in and 
authenticate to their domain.  (I'm not an NT admin, so I don't know how 
this works; this is just my simple understanding).  Both filers are 
running the same (very old I know) version of ONTAP:  NetApp Release 
6.1.1R2P1D12.  Of course, these are also very old filers, too:  F720s 
with about 70 GB useable.
Now, the plan was to move both filers to the LOCAL domain, so that CIFS 
users would not need to authenticate against a domain controller on the 
other side of the planet.  The problem is, the filer in the LOCAL domain 
keeps running into problems with users from both locations having 
trouble accessing the filer via CIFS.  The filer reports "FILER1 
unreachable.  An unexpected network error occurred."  Today I had the NT 
admins check, and they found errors in the log files on the LOCAL PDC.
> 8/4/04 11:45:39  Event ID: 3013 Description: The redirector has timed 
> out to FILER1
> 8/4/04 11:31:29  Event ID: 3013 Description: The redirector has timed 
> out to FILER1
> 8/4/04 11:17:09  Event ID: 3013 Description: The redirector has timed 
> out to FILER1
> 8/4/04 11:10:04  Event ID: 3013 Description: The redirector has timed 
> out to FILER1
>
I would have thought that if there were going to be problems, it would 
have been with the filer that is authenticating back to our CENTRAL 
domain controllers, but it has yet to have this problem.  
As I stated at the top, I am not an NT admin.  The NT admins here do not 
know anything about filers and insist that the problem lies there.  My 
experience tells me differently; the filers are very simple appliances 
that just plain work.  I checked the configuration options between the 
two filers and only found one option that was set differently; 
cifs.oplocks.enable was disabled on FILER1.  I enabled that option but I 
have still run into the problem.
Can someone point me in the right direction of where to look?  I have 
tried looking at the output from the `cifs stat` command, but I do not 
know what to look for.  Has anyone else run into this problem?  What 
solutions are available?  We are considering upgrading these in the near 
future, but our customers are (rightly) concerned that throwing money at 
this problem will not solve it.  Is this simply a case of old hardware 
being overwhelmed?
Thanks in advance for any help and ideas,
Geoff Hardin
UNIX System Administrator
Dallas Semiconductor / Maxim Integrated Products
geoff.hardin(a)dalsemi.com
Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.