Wodda bunch O'Whiners! how often do you actually boot from floppies! oh- maybe once at upgrade. tw
Rob Windsor windsor@adc.com@mathworks.com on 05/09/2001 03:16:11 PM
Please respond to Rob Windsor windsor@adc.com
Sent by: owner-toasters@mathworks.com
To: toasters@mathworks.com cc: Subject: Re: floppy shuffle
On Wed, 09 May 2001 15:06:13 EDT, "Todd C. Merrill" wrote:
Sorry to dredge up an old thread...
ONTAP 6.0.1R3: three floppies! ONTAP 6.1R1: *four* floppies!!
You guys are killin' me. I haven't had to do floppy shuffles like this since the days of floppy-boot Macintosh's. I can't even *find* any floppies to put these on, not even AOL ones.
Sounds like they need to move to bootable CDs. (distribute ISO images)
Rob++ ---------------------------------------
On Wed, 09 May 2001 15:54:20 EDT, Thomas.L.White@chase.com wrote:
Wodda bunch O'Whiners! how often do you actually boot from floppies! oh- maybe once at upgrade.
yeah, big "maybe" there. :>
I don't think I've ever booted from floppy during an upgrade (except for that one time the upgrade triggered a filesystem-related bug -- it went corrupt and I had to run WAFL_check).
More to the point, when I have to perform a WAFL_check under the gun, I'd rather not have to dig around for a fistful of floppies required to boot the filer for maint. Now we are FOUR TIMES more likely to encounter an aborted boot due to a floppy infected with bitrot. It is time to whine.
(How many folks keep a box of fresh, new diskettes around specifically for new revisions of ONTAP? How many just grab the first N unassigned floppies they see laying around their desk? How many use one floppy and re-image it on-the-fly as the filer asks for it? :)
Rob++ ---------------------------------------- Rob Windsor E-Mail - mailto:rob_windsor@adc.com Senior Unix Systems Administrator Voice - phone:972-680-6919 Computer Services Fax - phone:972-680-0370 Broadband Access and Transport Group __o ADC Telecommunications _`<,_ Richardson, TX 75082 (_)/ (_)
I have talked to my PSE about this before. When we went to two floppies, this wasn't so bad. Now we are three floppies and I suggested a bootable CD-ROM drive. Maybe in the next generation shelf. I would rather burn a CD as I, too, have trouble coughing up enough floppies for this operation. Consider, also, that the F700 series is Alpha based and the F800 series is Intel based. This means two sets of floppies for me. Fortunately my F520s are going back on lease and I do not have any more F330s. I could not even imagine an NAFS1400 today -- Yow!
Personally, I do not see this as whining but a request to the Lords of NetApp.
For OS upgrades, one only need transfer the system files and perform an "download" then reboot from HDD after that. No biggie there. When running diagnostics on the mother board and having to run across the data centre becomes a pain, though I do get my exercise in for the day. The Victoria Bitters Physical Fitness operating system. :-)
My $.02. Who get's the change?
-gdg
Rob Windsor wrote:
On Wed, 09 May 2001 15:54:20 EDT, Thomas.L.White@chase.com wrote:
Wodda bunch O'Whiners! how often do you actually boot from floppies! oh- maybe once at upgrade.
yeah, big "maybe" there. :>
I don't think I've ever booted from floppy during an upgrade (except for that one time the upgrade triggered a filesystem-related bug -- it went corrupt and I had to run WAFL_check).
More to the point, when I have to perform a WAFL_check under the gun, I'd rather not have to dig around for a fistful of floppies required to boot the filer for maint. Now we are FOUR TIMES more likely to encounter an aborted boot due to a floppy infected with bitrot. It is time to whine.
(How many folks keep a box of fresh, new diskettes around specifically for new revisions of ONTAP? How many just grab the first N unassigned floppies they see laying around their desk? How many use one floppy and re-image it on-the-fly as the filer asks for it? :)
Rob++
Rob Windsor E-Mail - mailto:rob_windsor@adc.com Senior Unix Systems Administrator Voice - phone:972-680-6919 Computer Services Fax - phone:972-680-0370 Broadband Access and Transport Group __o ADC Telecommunications _`<,_ Richardson, TX 75082 (_)/ (_)
(How many folks keep a box of fresh, new diskettes around specifically for new revisions of ONTAP? How many just grab the first N unassigned floppies they see laying around their desk? How many use one floppy and re-image it on-the-fly as the filer asks for it? :)
What we need is a gizmo like those cheesy "fake cassette tapes" that let you plug a portable CD player into the crappy old tape deck in your '83 Datsun. You know, the old pickup you just can't let go of, with the kicked in speaker that buzzes on the passenger side door, most of the wiring held together with black tape after you grudgingly replaced the old 8-track player. "Fercryinoutloud, one upgrade is enough! All this newfangled technology... now I have to go buy ANOTHER copy of the White Album." [1]
Yes, we need a floppy with a little cable that pops out and plugs into your laptop, so you can run a downloader program that spoofs the read heads and lets you feed all four floppy images without the swapping. THAT would be cool.
Of course, just typing "boot net" at the OpenBoot PROM, just like you can on every Sun built in the last decade, would be less funky but infinitely more useful. Or there's the whole "boot cdrom" thing. Those options are much more attractive to folks who don't want their data center looking like the set from "Brazil". I'm still lobbying for SNMP-managed lava lamps and a disco ball, but you know, IT budgets what they are these days...
-- Chris
[1] To paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black.
-- Chris Lamb, Unix Guy MeasureCast, Inc. 503-241-1469 x247 skeezics@measurecast.com
On Wed, 9 May 2001, Chris Lamb wrote:
Of course, just typing "boot net" at the OpenBoot PROM, just like you can on every Sun built in the last decade, would be less funky but infinitely more useful.
Yes! The bootprom stuff has some obvious Sun lineage in it; too bad they didn't pick that part up too.
windsor@adc.com (Rob Windsor) writes [...]
I don't think I've ever booted from floppy during an upgrade (except for that one time the upgrade triggered a filesystem-related bug -- it went corrupt and I had to run WAFL_check).
More to the point, when I have to perform a WAFL_check under the gun, I'd rather not have to dig around for a fistful of floppies required to boot the filer for maint. Now we are FOUR TIMES more likely to encounter an aborted boot due to a floppy infected with bitrot. It is time to whine.
With DOT 6.x (or maybe the corresponding firmware upgrades are what makes the difference) one can use control/C at the appropriate moment during booting from disc. As in Colossal Cave, "nothing obvious happens". :-) But when it gets to the appropriate point it now offers you the same menu as when booting from floppy, with options (1) to (5) ... and presumably the other magic words also work at this point!
This doesn't seem to be all that well documented.
(How many folks keep a box of fresh, new diskettes around specifically for new revisions of ONTAP? How many just grab the first N unassigned floppies they see laying around their desk? How many use one floppy and re-image it on-the-fly as the filer asks for it? :)
I recycle a set of floppies that I keep specifically for the NetApp filers. I have had to acquire some more because of the expansion in DOT size, which unfortunately is beginning to look like an instance of Moore's Law.
The real pain is testing: I don't want my disaster recovery to depend on a set of floppies that have never actually been booted from. But booting from floppy now takes so long that one has to schedule filer downtime for this: one can't get away with a "brief interruption to service" anouncement.
Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service, Email: cet1@ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG, Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.
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