Are there any plans to fix this in a future release? As I've been saying, it does seem like that would be a pretty common failure mode. It happened to me, and at least one other person who replied directly to me.

Or is this not considered to be a flaw? I must admit, I'm quite surpised, since the other devices that I have do have that functionality. The Intel "Adapter-Teaming technology" that I use on the servers does check for dataflow (via broadcasts), the BigIP HA load balancers can have "gateway failover" (where they ping a gateway and fail if they don't get a response back), and the Netscreen100 firewalls also implement gateway failover (a la the BigIPs).

This problem also evidenced itself when I was doing the "power failure" testing of my switches (i.e. unplugging a switch, and watching the failovers happen). I had the NetApp set to favor the gigE adapter, and when power was restored to the switch, the adapter got link before the switch booted (causing about 30seconds of downtime before the switch was actually able to route packets from the gigE adapter). I ended up having to "vif nofavor e8" to prevent that from happening. Which requires a manual "failback" to the gigE adapter once that switch is up again.

So, do people just not typically expect this kind of failover (dataflow checking)? As far as I am concerned, the full-loss-of-link failure mode would be much less common than the "loss-of-data-flow". For that matter, if you implement "gateway pinging", that gives a lot of flexibility in the redundancy configurations. I'd actually prefer gateway pinging to broadcast (since talking to the gateway is really the end-goal).

I guess people might usually just connect the filer to the database server in a back-to-back configuration, but that doesn't seem terribly flexible.

Thanks anyway, Jordan

-----Original Message----- From: cramer@netapp.com [mailto:cramer@netapp.com] Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2001 1:16 PM To: Jordan Share Cc: 'Toasters@Mathworks.Com' Subject: Re: vif's and failover

Does anyone have any experience with this? Can someone confirm or deny the failover in the event of loss of dataflow, but not loss of link?

The vif code detects the loss of link status, not the loss of dataflow. Only the loss of link status will cause a failover.

Sam