We purchased three F740s which have now been in service for 3 months. We bough an FCAL shelf for one filer but we transferred old SCSI shelves onto the other two. We assumed that we would just get the motherboard FCAL connection, but when they arrived each filer had another two FCAL interfaces in adapter slots 6 and 7. The connectors are completely different from the motherboard FCAL interface.
Unfortunately Netapp did not supply any terminators for these cards, so whenever we boot the filers we get moans like:
Loop on adapter 6 is open. If adapter is in use, check cabling and seating of LRC cards in FC shelves. isp2100_init: Initialization failed on FC adapter in slot 6.
We get this for slots 6 and 7 on the SCSI-only filers, and for the one unused interface on the FCAL filer.
I have moaned a number of times to our UK reseller but they say that Netapp don't supply terminators and we could always pull the cards out. I guess this is true but it's quite useful to have them there as a resilience feature. There are also rumours that these cards are somehow "better" than the motherboard interface.
Can anyone shed any light on this?
Dave Atkin ------------------------------------------------------ Dave Atkin, Head of Technical Services Computing Service, University of York, YORK YO10 5DD Phone: +44-1904-433804 (ddi) Fax: +44-1904-433740 Email: D.Atkin@york.ac.uk ------------------------------------------------------