Hi Edward,

"Get 7 200gb drives a pci raid controller and a decent pc and you have a better nfs/samba server than both those two machines combined."

You have to be kidding. Even an F720 will kill a current PC running Windows or Linux as far as wide-sharing I/O is concerned, not to mention data protection (NTFS, ext3 and Reiser are all traditional update-in-place filesystems, nowhere near as robust as WAFL. It would be better to say "...you have a more appropriate machine for low-cost home use".

"... worthless for home usage" is also a little strong. Certainly a NetApp is _overkill_ for most home use, but it's certainly not worthless.

I do know one person who keeps an old F760 at home to support his six machine Linux render farm (he's into video production at home). He's tried what you suggested (new PC with hardware RAID) and it simply can't keep up.

Technically most "home users" keeping old NetApp boxes are not actually doing anything illegal, as the licences are bound to the machine's serial number and are perpetual. The only catch is that legally they are restricted to the last version of OnTap that was available for download before the software subscription for that machine expired. (No, I don't want to spark that old debate again - just read your licence agreement for your old filers. I believe this did change with the 9xx series).

The only issue for them is having to do their own support - as you say, you wouldn't pay NetApp's commercial support fees for home use...!

--------------------------------------------------

Adam, you will probably find that your 740 is completely unsupported by NetApp, you might want to try to find a friendly reseller who has an old version of OnTap appropriate for your machine with the boot floppies. To be legal you would need to trace back to the previous owner, find out when their software subscription expired and find the last version of OnTap available before the expiry. Too hard really. My guess is that NetApp would not bother to prosecute a home user for running a more recent copy of OnTap. It's a little too grey legally and not worth their effort. On the other hand, if you use it for any commercial purpose that's a whole different scenario and you would want to make sure you are licenced, even if you don't care about the support.

Edward's comment about the drive failure rate is absolutely right - for commercial use. For your home use you would expect the drives won't be anywhere near as stressed and they will last much longer. You would be wise however to take advantage of the on-the-fly expansion and leave as many disks as possible as hot spares until you need them. That way you will have a large pool of spares that will decrease only as you add them to a volume or fail them out of the array.

Good Luck!

regards,

Alan McLachla ___________________________________ Solution Architect - Data Centre Solutions Dimension Data Australia Alan.McLachlan@didata.com.au Tel. +61 (0)2 61225123 Fax +61 (0)2 62486346 Mobile 0428 655644

----- Forwarded by Alan McLachlan on 08/11/2004 10:17 AM -----

Edward Valencia edjv@corp.earthlink.net Sent by: owner-toasters@mathworks.com 08/11/2004 07:24 AM

To: mikka makka mikkamakka@hotmail.com cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: F740 at home -- please help me!

You must like to waste electricity this is a wrothless product to have at home. Get 7 200gb drives a pci raid controller and a decent pc and you have a better nfs/samba server than both those two machines combined. Also the rate that the disk failures occur on such old systems you will need alot of spares, the cost isnt worth it. Sell it on ebay or something and use the money to build the system described.

To be able to download the software for your netapps, you will need to register the heads and then see if they have the software entitlement enabled. As I said these systems are worthless for home usage. Since netapp makes thier money on supporting the harwdware, than the hardware itself. The cost to enable parts replacements on 13 F760s for us was 135k a year. Ten thousand a year for next day support and a nfs license. Tells you alot.

Edwardv-

mikka makka wrote:

Hi all> Last year I inherited an F740 filer with two FC9 shelves (7x36 GB disks). I used it happily at home for a few months and then a disk began to fail -- one had already failed, so that put the unit out of commission although luckily I was able to get all my data off it before total lossage. I bought a couple of Seagate ST136403FC drives -- the same model number as in the drive carriers -- off ebay and tried swapping them in, but no luck; the system wouldn't recognize them. On a

hunch that it might have to do with firmware I tried swapping the drive's controller boards (old drives' controllers with new drives), but

that didn't work either; the system wouldn't come up, dumping core for some reason. I figured the drives themselves probably needed to be zeroed/initialized/labeled in some way that made them acceptable to the Netapp, but I couldn't figure out any way to get the Netapp up and into a mode that would let me do that. Finally, lacking documentation for the system, I gave up.

Fast-forward a little, I just inherited a second filer, an F720, also with two FC9 (7x36) shelves. As far as I know all disks good. Unfortunately it won't boot up (it finds and loads the image, gives the "Initializing PCI devices" and then suddenly reboots itself, without even dumping core). I'm not sure what the problem could be.

I tried plugging in some of the disks from the new shelves in place of the bad disks in the old one, and now the 740 starts up and gives me a "File system may be scrambled" message -- well, of course it is, since the replaced disks contain who-knows-what, but I don't see how I can proceed from there. I'm not worried about getting back the original file system as I backed it up -- I just want to clear everything out and

make a new one.

The situation seems to me to be this: I've got an F740 (and a spare F720), and four shelves with a grand total of 26 good, identical, disks (and maybe even 28, if I could get the drive controller swap to work). That's 900GB of storage.

I'm sure I should be able somehow to hook the four shelves up to the 740, reinitialize the whole system and all the drives somehow, and start

afresh with a working 900GB filesystem. But I don't have the docs and floppy or whatever that came with the filers and I have no idea how to proceed given that the filer won't even start up to give me a command prompt that I might be able to work with. I'm not sure if I would need to boot from a floppy (I don't have one) or what...

Is there anyone out there who could help, in any way? I'd be forever grateful... For the few months I had the 740 running, it was heaven -- amazing having a file server like this at home, even though I was using only the smallest fraction of its capabilities. Now that I have four disk shelves, I'm really motivated to get it working again, but I'm truly stuck without documentation

Thanks so much for any help you could offer, Adam Jacobs mikkamakka@hotmail.com

.

---

Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's FREE!

http://messenger.msn.com/

****************************************************************************** - NOTICE FROM DIMENSION DATA AUSTRALIA This message is confidential, and may contain proprietary or legally privileged information. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender and delete it immediately.

Internet communications are not secure. You should scan this message and any attachments for viruses. Under no circumstances do we accept liability for any loss or damage which may result from your receipt of this message or any attachments. ******************************************************************************