David,

Exactly what kind of issues are you seeing. I have the exact same setup except I have Gigabit instead of 100Mb. The issue primarily seems to be opening Office files from a share can take 30+ seconds. Other files types don't seem to be such an issue although I've personally seen a tiny text file take 20 seconds to open in Notepad. I've been the lone voice in the wilderness claiming it's not a Filer problem although it sounds like that might not be entirely true. We did see that running NAV with network drive checking enabled significantly made file access slower. We've done extensive testing and trouble shooting with the local NetApp folks. They discovered the NAV problem. The biggest reason I've not been looking at the Filer as a source of the problem is we've experienced the exact same behavior when accessing files from a share on an NT server. That in conjunction with some packet captures we've done seem to point to a problem with NT's TCP/IP stack. The stack starts out using very small packets and takes forever to ramp up to a decent packet size (Win2K is much faster - in tests a Win2K box on 100Mb ran laps around an NT server using Gigabit). We also use NIS as our primary means of authentication on the Filer and we still haven't ruled this out as an issue.

I'm certainly interested in learning more about your problem and everything you learn/hear. This has been made a "top priority" for me to resolve and it's been frustrating because there doesn't seem to be a "smoking gun" and in the meanwhile management and users are cursing the good name of NetApp.

Michael Cope Unix Systems Administrator Isis Pharmaceuticals mcope@isisph.com