On Wed, 12 Jul 2000, Todd C. Merrill wrote:
Amen. To that end, I signed up for NetApp's 202 class (I think that's the number...) next week. I hope to get all kinds of useful info on what's available to measure, what things to look for for trouble, etc. Will report back at the end of July...
Last Thursday and Friday I attended the 2-day NetApp 202 "Advanced Administration and Troubleshooting" class. Overall, this was an okay class: not extremely useful, but not a total waste of time. (N.B.: I have almost 3 years experience dealing with filers, with NFS and CIFS, in a performance heavy environment; this class seemed targeted to someone with 1-2 years who has a good grasp of the basics but not too much experience dealing with bugs, problems, and performance issues. I wish I had taken the course about a year ago!)
There was heavy coverage of a lot of the rc_toggle_basic commands. The most useful things I got out of it were things to look for with the `wafl_susp` and `statit` commands. The discussions about RAID group sizes, consistency points, and WAFL design goals were a good, coherent reminder of questions and topics mostly covered here on the list in the past. (Sifting through and remembering them is the hard part!)
Being able to play with a non-critical filer in the numerous hands-on labs was excellent! There were 6 or 8 F740's with a shelf of disks on each upon which the students practiced their recently learned witchcraft. Hand editing disk labels, normally a harrowing prospect, was dangerously easy. Doing a WAFL_check [0] involved neither trembling fingers nor a sweaty brow. It's really amazing how easy administering a filer is...when it's not your data, when you don't have responsibility for it, and when your boss or your whole company isn't banging on the server room door demanding to know what's wrong.
Lunch was not provided. Lame. The party favors...ah, I mean, parting gifts were these self-foldup bags. Lame. (I can't even *give* this bag away.) Give us something we can actually use, like a T-shirt, or an FCAL disk. There were rumblings of a coup towards the end, to knock out and tie down the instructor, and then raid [1] the lab equipment, so each person could take home either a filer head or a shelf of disks, but the instructor was such a nice guy, we couldn't do it. (Hi, Stefan! Do you know how close you came to waking up late Friday night with a bump on your head in a darkened broom closet in a mass of duct tape and tie wraps? ;)
I am now ready to attack with confidence my filers when next they get beat into the ground with thousands more ops/s than they are rated for, which should be just...about...now....
[0] What happened to the cool, fun names, like "wack," "wackz," "wacky"? WAFL_check is so....sterile and fuddy-duddy. [1] do I even need to say it?
Until next time...
The Mathworks, Inc. 508-647-7000 x7792 3 Apple Hill Drive, Natick, MA 01760-2098 508-647-7001 FAX tmerrill@mathworks.com http://www.mathworks.com ---