Jason,

We do have 2 F740's clustered, the first one (our "original" filer) has 2 racks of 9 gig drives, while the newer cluster partner has 2 racks of 18gig drives. We do not use virtual interfaces, so I'm not sure what relevance our experience is. We did have quite an adventure, with many "downs", all on the first filer, although none turned out to be cluster related. We have not had any drive failures to date. We are on 5.2.1P2D6, primarily because we are an exclusive CIFS shop, and due to some networking problems, the filer would reboot itself (an problem with WAFL handling CIFS that sends commands out of sequence). Netapp worked hard and vigorously to retrofit a patch that is in 5.3.1 (and thus not released) into 5.2.1 (thus the D6).

We did have some initial issue with the disk shelves on our 1st filer that required swapping them to get clustering to work. All clustering commands have worked as advertised, but as we only have one physical interface running at this time, I'm not sure it helps you.

--srs

-----Original Message----- From: Jason D. Kelleher [mailto:kelleher@susq.com] Sent: Monday, April 05, 1999 10:50 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: F740 cluster

Anybody out there have an F740 cluster w/ 18GB drives running in production? If so, I have a couple of questions I'm hoping you can answer:

1) Have any problems loosing routes over a virtual interface? If you physically disconect all the links in a trunk it drops all routes which use that interface, even static routes w/ routed off.

2) Have you been able to takeover/giveback a virtual interface? Treating it like a "normal" interface doesn't seem to work and I haven't been able to find any special instructions for this.

3) Any unexplained panics? We had one running 5.2.1 in takeover mode -- didn't even drop core. Another attributed to a bad disk while we were running 5.2.1P1. We're now at 5.2.1P2 after several ndmpd hangs (didn't bring down the filer), seems to be stable.

4) How many disk failures did you see within the first 6 months of getting the filer? (looks like we're on 2 of 24 in 3 months and we haven't even used them all yet).

5) Do you have the name and address of the person in charge of the hold muzac for the support line? The 5 minute loop of garbage is really ramping up my aggression level and I'd prefer to take it out on the person responsible.

I have a couple of open calls with support I'm waiting for status on, but I'm not calling them because if I have to listen to that damned muzac tape loop around one more time I'm going to kill someone. Since my office-mate is closest it would probably be him... and that would just leave me more work to do. (Moving bodies, digging holes, and handling all his projects...)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

jason

--- Jason D. Kelleher kelleher@susq.com Susquehanna Partners, G.P. 610.617.2721 (voice) 401 City Line Ave, Suite 220 610.617.2916 (fax) Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004-1122