I think some of these issues have been raised before, but I thought I would raise them again :)
We just upgraded our filer from 4.2a to 4.3.3 this morning. When we got the 4.3.3 files from NOW, we read the firmware docs. They state that you must have firmware 1.6 and above to run 4.2a and above. So, we thought "no problem; we are running 4.2a so we must have 1.6 on the box".
Wrong.
We had version 1.4a of the firmware on our f540.
So, I had to get someone at the NOC to do all the floppy shuffling (our site is 2500 miles away). No problem. I just get scared whenever I do a firmware upgrade. Some scars never heal :)
Ok, the firmware upgrade goes well. We then proceed to do the DataONTAP upgrade. No problem. There should be a note in the docs that warn of the time delay when doing a "download". I had not done one in a while and had forgotten all about it. might be nice to let folks know that this may take a few minutes.
Ok, so I now have a f540 filer with firmware 1.6 and ONTAP 4.3.3. Whoohoo.
Now, my concerns:
- there should be a better way of looking at the firmware rev, other than having to halt the filer.
- the system boot should be logged (all of it, including the firmware banner, like a Sun)
- a CHANGELOG for firmware revs would be nice
I think these changes would be nice.
We have been having some odd issues with our FDDI (at around midnight the filer stops doing NFS on the FDDI interface; we down and up the interface and all is good). I wonder if this would have anything to do with an incorrect firmware rev... we have swapped the card and pci slot it is in. I am hoping that the new firmware/os will perhaps clear the problem.
Alexei