You completely misunderstood my post. I was suggesting that your recommended solution (the PCI raid + new drives) was the "more appropriate low-cost alternative"
My objection was to your statement that the PC +RAID was a "better" NFS+Samba server than a NetApp, which is clearly not the case.
Read it again.
regards,
Alan McLachlan
___________________________________
Solution Architect - Data Centre Solutions
Dimension Data Australia
Alan.McLachlan@didata.com.au
Tel. +61 (0)2 61225123
Fax +61 (0)2 62486346
Mobile 0428 655644
----- Forwarded by Alan McLachlan on 09/11/2004 09:20 AM -----
Edward Valencia <edjv@corp.earthlink.net>
09/11/2004 05:31 AM
To: Alan.McLachlan@didata.com.au
cc:
Subject: Re: F740 at home -- please help me!
Alan.McLachlan@didata.com.au wrote:
>
> Hi Edward,
>
>
> "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."
>
> You have to be kidding. Even an F720 will kill a current PC running
> Windows or Linux as far as wide-sharing I/O is concerned, not to mention
> data protection (NTFS, ext3 and Reiser are all traditional
> update-in-place filesystems, nowhere near as robust as WAFL. It would be
> better to say "...you have a more appropriate machine for low-cost home
> use".
>
Wrong words used in part, but a netapp is not a low cost alternative to
the average user as you stated. Im not trying to start a flame war here,
just telling the guy that not to expect much from service and support if
he is interested in keeping vital data on these machines when support
is extremely expensive.
Using these older machines to learn and to get more expirience is always
a plus for anyone.
> "... worthless for home usage" is also a little strong. Certainly a
> NetApp is _overkill_ for most home use, but it's certainly not worthless.
>
> I do know one person who keeps an old F760 at home to support his six
> machine Linux render farm (he's into video production at home). He's
> tried what you suggested (new PC with hardware RAID) and it simply can't
> keep up.
This is the exception and its very rare that an average home user would
use this type of equipment for anything more that keeping large amounts
of video/audio.
>
> Technically most "home users" keeping old NetApp boxes are not actually
> doing anything illegal, as the licences are bound to the machine's
> serial number and are perpetual.
Never said that there was anything illegal about having the equipment,
other than the support/service is all tied to the serial number on the head.
The only catch is that legally they are
> restricted to the last version of OnTap that was available for download
> before the software subscription for that machine expired. (No, I don't
> want to spark that old debate again - just read your licence agreement
> for your old filers. I believe this did change with the 9xx series).
>
> The only issue for them is having to do their own support - as you say,
> you wouldn't pay NetApp's commercial support fees for home use...!
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> Adam, you will probably find that your 740 is completely unsupported by
> NetApp, you might want to try to find a friendly reseller who has an old
> version of OnTap appropriate for your machine with the boot floppies. To
> be legal you would need to trace back to the previous owner, find out
> when their software subscription expired and find the last version of
> OnTap available before the expiry. Too hard really. My guess is that
> NetApp would not bother to prosecute a home user for running a more
> recent copy of OnTap. It's a little too grey legally and not worth their
> effort. On the other hand, if you use it for any commercial purpose
> that's a whole different scenario and you would want to make sure you
> are licenced, even if you don't care about the support.
>
> Edward's comment about the drive failure rate is absolutely right - for
> commercial use. For your home use you would expect the drives won't be
> anywhere near as stressed and they will last much longer. You would be
> wise however to take advantage of the on-the-fly expansion and leave as
> many disks as possible as hot spares until you need them. That way you
> will have a large pool of spares that will decrease only as you add them
> to a volume or fail them out of the array.
>
> Good Luck!
>
> regards,
>
> Alan McLachla
> ___________________________________
> Solution Architect - Data Centre Solutions
> Dimension Data Australia
> Alan.McLachlan@didata.com.au
> Tel. +61 (0)2 61225123
> Fax +61 (0)2 62486346
> Mobile 0428 655644
>
> ----- Forwarded by Alan McLachlan on 08/11/2004 10:17 AM -----
> *Edward Valencia <edjv@corp.earthlink.net>*
> Sent by: owner-toasters@mathworks.com
>
> 08/11/2004 07:24 AM
>
>
> To: mikka makka <mikkamakka@hotmail.com>
> 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/
> >
>
>
>
>
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