Have you considered the Data ONTAP simulator? It will do almost everything a filer can do (even clusters) and you get close to the latest version to play with (do that on your F720). Software licenses are free, it only takes up space on your hard drive and doesn't sound like a jumbo jet taking off.
Of course it doesn't replace the fun of tinkering with hardware. I guess it all comes down to what your goals are.
--Aaron
-----Original Message----- From: Ben Rockwood [mailto:BRockwood@homestead-inc.com] Sent: Monday, 8 November 2004 8:28 PM To: Edward Valencia; mikka makka Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: F740 at home -- please help me!
I will remind you Edward that many of the users who wish to use Filers at home are trying to improve their skills. Obviously buying a couple 200G IDE/SATA disks is a better solution, but give us fellas who like to hack at home because it's all we've got a little credit. :)
This only strikes a nerve with me because it's at the heart of the old legal issues of off-support heads.
benr.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com on behalf of Edward Valencia Sent: Sun 11/7/2004 12:24 PM To: mikka makka Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: F740 at home -- please help me! You must like to waste electricity this is a wrothless product to have at home. Get 7 200gb drives a pci raid controller and a decent pc and you have a better nfs/samba server than both those two machines combined. Also the rate that the disk failures occur on such old systems you will need alot of spares, the cost isnt worth it. Sell it on ebay or something and use the money to build the system described.
To be able to download the software for your netapps, you will need to register the heads and then see if they have the software entitlement enabled. As I said these systems are worthless for home usage. Since netapp makes thier money on supporting the harwdware, than the hardware itself. The cost to enable parts replacements on 13 F760s for us was 135k a year. Ten thousand a year for next day support and a nfs license. Tells you alot.
Edwardv-
mikka makka wrote:
Hi all,
Last year I inherited an F740 filer with two FC9 shelves (7x36 GB disks). I used it happily at home for a few months and then a disk began to fail -- one had already failed, so that put the unit out of commission although luckily I was able to get all my data off it before total lossage. I bought a couple of Seagate ST136403FC drives -- the same model number as in the drive carriers -- off ebay and tried swapping them in, but no luck; the system wouldn't recognize them. On a hunch that it might have to do with firmware I tried swapping the drive's controller boards (old drives' controllers with new drives), but that didn't work either; the system wouldn't come up, dumping core for some reason. I figured the drives themselves probably needed to be zeroed/initialized/labeled in some way that made them acceptable to the Netapp, but I couldn't figure out any way to get the Netapp up and into a mode that would let me do that. Finally, lacking documentation for the system, I gave up.
Fast-forward a little, I just inherited a second filer, an F720, also with two FC9 (7x36) shelves. As far as I know all disks good. Unfortunately it won't boot up (it finds and loads the image, gives the "Initializing PCI devices" and then suddenly reboots itself, without even dumping core). I'm not sure what the problem could be.
I tried plugging in some of the disks from the new shelves in place of the bad disks in the old one, and now the 740 starts up and gives me a "File system may be scrambled" message -- well, of course it is, since the replaced disks contain who-knows-what, but I don't see how I can proceed from there. I'm not worried about getting back the original file system as I backed it up -- I just want to clear everything out and make a new one.
The situation seems to me to be this: I've got an F740 (and a spare F720), and four shelves with a grand total of 26 good, identical, disks (and maybe even 28, if I could get the drive controller swap to work). That's 900GB of storage.
I'm sure I should be able somehow to hook the four shelves up to the 740, reinitialize the whole system and all the drives somehow, and start afresh with a working 900GB filesystem. But I don't have the docs and floppy or whatever that came with the filers and I have no idea how to proceed given that the filer won't even start up to give me a command prompt that I might be able to work with. I'm not sure if I would need to boot from a floppy (I don't have one) or what...
Is there anyone out there who could help, in any way? I'd be forever grateful... For the few months I had the 740 running, it was heaven -- amazing having a file server like this at home, even though I was using only the smallest fraction of its capabilities. Now that I have four disk shelves, I'm really motivated to get it working again, but I'm truly stuck without documentation
Thanks so much for any help you could offer, Adam Jacobs mikkamakka@hotmail.com
.
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.com/
************** IMPORTANT MESSAGE ************** This e-mail message is intended only for the addressee(s) and contains information which may be confidential. If you are not the intended recipient please advise the sender by return email, do not use or disclose the contents, and delete the message and any attachments from your system. Unless specifically indicated, this email does not constitute formal advice or commitment by the sender or the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (ABN 48 123 123 124) or its subsidiaries. We can be contacted through our web site: commbank.com.au. If you no longer wish to receive commercial electronic messages from us, please reply to this e-mail by typing Unsubscribe in the subject line. ***************************************************************