I have two filers in a remote office (the Philippines, while we are located in Dallas). One of these filers, FILER1, authenticates to the local domain, let's call it LOCAL, and the other, FILER2, authenticates back to our domain, let's call it CENTRAL. There is a trust between the LOCAL and the CENTRAL domains so users from either domain can log in and authenticate to their domain. (I'm not an NT admin, so I don't know how this works; this is just my simple understanding). Both filers are running the same (very old I know) version of ONTAP: NetApp Release 6.1.1R2P1D12. Of course, these are also very old filers, too: F720s with about 70 GB useable.

Now, the plan was to move both filers to the LOCAL domain, so that CIFS users would not need to authenticate against a domain controller on the other side of the planet. The problem is, the filer in the LOCAL domain keeps running into problems with users from both locations having trouble accessing the filer via CIFS. The filer reports "FILER1 unreachable. An unexpected network error occurred." Today I had the NT admins check, and they found errors in the log files on the LOCAL PDC.

8/4/04 11:45:39 Event ID: 3013 Description: The redirector has timed out to FILER1 8/4/04 11:31:29 Event ID: 3013 Description: The redirector has timed out to FILER1 8/4/04 11:17:09 Event ID: 3013 Description: The redirector has timed out to FILER1 8/4/04 11:10:04 Event ID: 3013 Description: The redirector has timed out to FILER1

I would have thought that if there were going to be problems, it would have been with the filer that is authenticating back to our CENTRAL domain controllers, but it has yet to have this problem.

As I stated at the top, I am not an NT admin. The NT admins here do not know anything about filers and insist that the problem lies there. My experience tells me differently; the filers are very simple appliances that just plain work. I checked the configuration options between the two filers and only found one option that was set differently; cifs.oplocks.enable was disabled on FILER1. I enabled that option but I have still run into the problem.

Can someone point me in the right direction of where to look? I have tried looking at the output from the `cifs stat` command, but I do not know what to look for. Has anyone else run into this problem? What solutions are available? We are considering upgrading these in the near future, but our customers are (rightly) concerned that throwing money at this problem will not solve it. Is this simply a case of old hardware being overwhelmed?

Thanks in advance for any help and ideas,

Geoff Hardin UNIX System Administrator Dallas Semiconductor / Maxim Integrated Products geoff.hardin@dalsemi.com Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.