Michael,

I too am running enterprise NT on the same subnet and have a 200MB channel dedicated to the scanner. I have seen pretty good performance but as I said have some issues that Symantec and Netapp are addressing. I believe you may have hit on some of them so I will do my best to help...

First I found out few months ago, and will post to toasters about the following hidden option

vscan options mandatory_scan off

Once you set this option, even if the scanner becomes unavailable or unreachable for some reason the Filer will serve files. I ran into this and it is a compounded issue, for one it doesn't give the file but it also provides an erroneous error saying a network error has occurred which could spawn 100's of unnessary, misdirected help desk calls.

As for the 3-4 weeks stop scanning issue, not sure if this is the same as the one I have had but the Filer I run CSS against is for developers. It currently has over 600GB in more then 1.5 million files. As I said I get very good performance but some of these files are huge and the CSS box times out on them. So it seems after a certain amount of time outs and/or when the queue gets filled and this happens the Filer disconnects itself from the CSS box.

The CSS box will always continue to try and reconnect because of the following configuration in the symscan.cfg file

RPCMaxReconnectAttempts=0

Unfortunately the Filer will not try to reconnect so in order to get this back to a functional state you need to stop and start the services on the NT box running CSS. I have asked Symantec to work with Netapp on this and they are but so far I am told it may have something to do with the limitations of RPC and Netapps implementation. I suggested maybe this could be changed from RPC to NPMP but not sure if that is possible. They said they would look into it.

Other suggestions I have, is for you to make a few other changes to your symscan.cfg file. First with your connectivity I would change your ScanThreads entry from the default. With a 200MB dedicated pipe mine is now =50.

Another is is if you don't have CSS configured to send you mail you should, mine are as follows

SMTPPrimary= Your SMTP Mail Host SMTPSecondary= SMTPCrashAlertEnable=1 SMTPStartUpAlertEnable=1 SMTPShutDownAlertEnable=1 SMTPDefUpdateAlertEnable=1 SMTPLoadExceededAlertEnable=1 SMTPDefErrorAlertEnable=0 SMTPRecipList= E-mail Addresses SMTPDomain=

With these settings you will be notified when there is an overflow, a crash, and when the services stop and start. The overflow is the most useful because when I see a large increment of these e-mails I keep an eye out for that disconnection which causes me to have to stop and restart the 2 CSS services.

I am trying to automate some of this stuff but just haven't had time yet. Hopefully this made sense and helps. I know this is a long e-mail and apologize to everyone but wanted to try and provide as much detail as possible.

Seth

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