I would be very interested to hear from other people using NetApps for news spools for any advice on optimally configuring the NetApp for this purpose.
e.g., no snapshots, increase the number of inodes, no atime update, disable NFS over TCP, ...?
That last paragraph pretty much describes our situation - and it works like a charm! And yes, we have a private 100 Mbps Ethernet (crossover cable) between the Ultrasparc and the NetApp. We keep active, history and outgoing on local disk, and use the NetApp for articles and over- view.
The Ultrasparc/Solaris 2.5.1/NetApp system has been *extremely* stable for us. Not a single crash of any kind during several months of service. It just runs. We're happy :-)
Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no