to learn ontapp, the better and easier is (i think) download a netapp simulator and make it run on a linux box

about the license, OpenVMS license, OS and some papers are available as reasonable cost (perfect for home user)
Netapp could do the same : a light fee to be able to get 537r3D18 for every F7xx Filer and access the now.netapp.com doc


Ben Rockwood wrote:
I will remind you Edward that many of the users who wish to use Filers
at home are trying to improve their skills.  Obviously buying a couple
200G IDE/SATA disks is a better solution, but give us fellas who like
to hack at home because it's all we've got a little credit. :)

This only strikes a nerve with me because it's at the heart of the old
legal issues of off-support heads.

benr.

-----Original Message-----
From:	owner-toasters@mathworks.com on behalf of Edward Valencia
Sent:	Sun 11/7/2004 12:24 PM
To:	mikka makka
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

.

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