Just a one time TEST

-----Original Message----- From: tkaczma@gryf.net [mailto:tkaczma@gryf.net] Sent: Wednesday, May 05, 1999 8:00 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: A few general bitches and moans.

I agree with you on many points, but ...

On Tue, 4 May 1999, Jaye Mathisen wrote:

o CIFS support has got some big holes.

• The inability to belong to multiple domains. Not all my domains trust each other. Oops, now the filer

is essentially unusable for some of them.

Can NT boxes do this?

• Even the ability to have a different network interface belong to a

different domain would be useful. Not a panacea, but at least useful.

Can NT boxes do this as well?

o The general suckiness of NFS now being insufficient to backup the filer with CIFS. Probably not a solveable problem, but it still sucks.

If NFS sucks so much use CIFS only. Apparently they both suck in some ways that are different from another because you ARE using them to complement each other.

Heck, I saw some very scary numbers from consensys for their IDE raid product, use IDE drives instead of scsi in this bad boy, and cut them costs down. WD makes 7200 RPM drives now, at 18GB's a pop, and 5 of 'em fit in a 3 high bay.

The price differences between SCSI and IDE are not that significant anymore, but I was wondering why someone didn't come up with and IDE appliance. The argument that I would come up with is that you can only have 2 devices on one bus, much too few for a RAID 5 set. This also applies to your request for a 3 disk appliance. The power of striping comes from the number of drives. The more drives you add the smaller the parity overhead. With 3 drives 33.3 ... % is "wasted" on parity. With 14 drives the "waste" goes down to about 7%.

(And no, I'm not interested in the philosophical war of IDE vs SCSI. Fact: IDE is currently cheaper than SCSI. Fact: I want this box to be cheap. Check and mate. :))

No mate, and probably not even check. SCSI drives are not THAT much more expensive anymore. You must remember that you can have only 2 IDE drives on the bus, among other limitations. The money you save in drives will probably be made up in the complexity of the controllers and software. Everything costs money, the drives are only a fraction of the cost.

Nothing like not having the right serial cable wired up, and having to type all those stupid commands by hand when you make a booboo, and plus the grief of having to boot off two floppies.

Well, instead of Flash cards carry a serial cable and write macros in your terminal program so you don't have to type commands by hand. Try a terminal program like Telemate or Telix. I assume you're a PC user.

o Or add an option to read rc from disk 3 on a DOS formatted floppy.

But it reads it from the drive array, so what's the point?

o Fine, you don't want to use something like PCMCIA cards, then since Netapp only allows its network cards, allow tftp of the rc file from one of the interfaces.

Why? You should have it on your drives. Besides, you can upload it using the console connection.

I guess the CIFS stuff is what's torquing me off right now the most, I don't want to have to slap a bunch of storage on some NT boxes when I have this filer sitting there perfectly suited (in theory) to do the job..., and I refuse to purchase 1 filer per domain.

Can your NT boxes be each in two different domains at the same time? Talk to B. G. III for using such a decrepid protocol as lanmanager.

Tom