From Chris Thompson on Fri, 24 Mar 2000 14:49:50 GMT:

I remember asking about moving the "savecore" after the "nfs on" back in the days of FASware 3.1.6 (or had they renamed it ONTAP by then?)

We have been putting "savecore" after "nfs on" for quite a while now. It works as expected allowing client connections while the the core is being saved into the file system. Unfortuantely, CIFS doesn't come on until after the completion of all commands in "/etc/rc", so the only way to get it on first is to not have "savecore" in there at all and just run it manually. This doesn't seem like a good idea..

and got a generally discouraging response, along the lines of "if turning NFS on provokes another crash, you could be in trouble".

Actually if you crash a second time before "savecore" has run, you merely can't dump the new core. In fact, it says something like "Dupming core... Can't dump, core already present on disk." IMHO, a problem that crashes your filer that quickly should be visible in the first core. If not, just boot off floppy and do a savecore. 99% of our NetApp crashes involve a sucessful core dump and reboot cycle.

Eventually I did make the change: the main problem turned out to be that savecore thrashed the filing system so hard (this was on an FAServer 450) that NFS hardly got a look-in, just at the time when the clients were retrying all their outstanding requests.

That could have been the fact that it was an FAServer 450. =) Our 300, 500, 600, and 700 series filers don't seem to have a problem handling NFS and "savecore" simultaneously.

-- Jeff

-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeff Krueger E-Mail: jeff@qualcomm.com NetApp File Server Lead Phone: 858-651-6709 IT Engineering and Support Fax: 858-651-6627 QUALCOMM, Incorporated Web: www.qualcomm.com