I've recently moved files from a F740 onto a new F820. This happened on Monday and on Tuesday morning the F820 suddenly stopped serving data. It became so unresponsive that I was unable to even get in thru the console. I got prompted for a password but it never got to a command line prompt. The Filer didn't appear to be excessively busy beforehand and the network connection (Gigabit) still appeared to be fine. Basically, the Filer appeared fine externally and the LCD panel showed that there were 0 ops a second. The only way I could get the Filer "running" again was to cycle power.
The Filer has been fine since then. There were no messages in the syslog and it didn't dump a core file (I know now how to force it to dump a core for diagnosis), so NetApp tech support hasn't been able to provide much assistance or explanation.
I've seen this same behavior twice on the the F740 in the last 2 months but that had been diagnosed as a faulty Fibre Channel controller seizing up when the workload got too high. Other than the actual data files, the only thing these two Filers have in common is Data ONTAP 6.1R1. I'm running 6.1R1 on two other Filers and have had no problems. It just seems very coincidental that I didn't experience this on the F740 until after I installed this version of ONTAP.
Anyone else seen this behavior before or noticed any irregularities with 6.1R1 (I'm not running in a cluster so the latest updates/bug fixes don't appear helpful)
Thanx,
Michael Cope UNIX/Linux Systems Administrator Isis Pharmaceuticals mcope@isisph.com
UNIX is very user friendly... it's just highly selective about who it makes friends WITH!