We eval'ed one of the Quantum Guardian/SnapServer boxes awhile back. While there was a command line, you had to do everything from the GUI, and even though it was Linux underneath, you couldn't use all the standard options in the export file through the GUI.
We ended up sending it back and continuing to buy NetApps. It was the old 'good, cheap, fast' pick at most two. NetApp is good and fast, but not cheap. The Quantum thing wasn't that cheap, and wasn't any good, and was too broken to test fast.
Flat text files are good. If NetApp wants to make everything into a database, at least have an option to populate the database from a text file. Having `exportfs -a` read /etc/exports and create /etc/exports.db is fine, but I want to be able to edit a text file.
We keep quotas, exports and a few other of the config files under RCS on all our filers, so any automatic 'helpful' changes will be lost at the next check-out.
John
-----Original Message----- From: Mike Sphar [mailto:mike.sphar@Remedy.COM] Sent: Wednesday, August 18, 2004 12:09 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: Automatic NFS export on vol create
Speaking purely for myself, as a long-time Sysadmin, the fact that so much of Netapp's config is stored in text files was a *big* advantage to me. Databases always seem like a good idea until they get corrupted, or the front-end administration tools fail because of bad data. (Anyone else ever adminned AIX? Hell, just the other day I had to spend a fair amount of time trying to repair a corrupted registry on a Windows box.)