First off, thank you Dave for an excellent summary.
And now for a few comments:
FAServer 400 The first box. A black tower tower unit. The systems units held 7 GB and could do 400 ops/sec. (Hence the name.)
We've got one of these. It's got 7x2GB disks for 14 GB of disk space that, with parity and file system overhead comes out to about 10 GB of usable RAID storage. It's been in the back closet for almost a year now, but we still periodically think about playing with it again. If we don't find a production use for it soon, and if netapp doesn't offer a good trade in value for it, I think my boss is gonna let me take it home and play with it.
FAServer 450 Same box, but with a faster CPU. Maybe we also allowed the expansion cabinet (a second black tower) at the same time.
We've got a few of these in use right now. These took 4 GB disks and had room for 14 disks inside (slightly bigger box, beige). I know we've got at least one, possible 2 or 3 still in production use. The one I know about has 7x2GB and 7x4GB for about 30 GB effective storage.
F330 The first PCI bus. The first bright blue
Got one of these. It holds hundreds and hundreds of home directories, plus other stuff.
F540 Twice as fast as the F330. (Cool silver metal
Got one of these. It does news.
F220 NUCLEAR BANANA BEZEL!!! Ahem. This is a cost
Got one of these. It does suport for some production machines, cuz we wanted to split off the F330, where the users constantly use up all the available space and take more, from the production NFS server, where we control and even, to some degree, predict how much space each service uses.
I like the NUCLEAR BANANA BEZEL too.
So, I've got two more questions, one semi-technical, and one not:
1. How do you delete the file system on a NetApp? If I want to newfs the file system, how do I do it?
2. What are the various names people have given their machines? We've had toaster, blender, fridge, icebox, tv, vcr, vaccuum, washer, compactor, furnace, and microwave. (No, we don't have that many netapps--some of these names are on different interfaces of the same boxes, or a box that was retired, and then reused elsewhere with a different name.)
Amy
So, I've got two more questions, one semi-technical, and one not:
- How do you delete the file system on a NetApp? If I want to newfs the
file system, how do I do it?
I think you do a floppy boot and you get a menu, you then do option 1 "Create new file system" or some such.
This takes a long time as it zeroes/initializes parity. I think it gives you an estimate of time...
(Don't ask why I don't know the exact details here:-)
- What are the various names people have given their machines? We've had
toaster, blender, fridge, icebox, tv, vcr, vaccuum, washer, compactor, furnace, and microwave. (No, we don't have that many netapps--some of these names are on different interfaces of the same boxes, or a box that was retired, and then reused elsewhere with a different name.)
maytag is popular. We've been using machine tool names "bosch", "makita".
Appliance brand names are fun: whirlpool, kenmore, etc.
While we are not "NAC" anymore, early on people had fun with "ixnac", "nicnac", etc.
Amy
On Tue, 24 Jun 1997, Brian Pawlowski wrote:
So, I've got two more questions, one semi-technical, and one not:
- How do you delete the file system on a NetApp? If I want to newfs the
file system, how do I do it?
I think you do a floppy boot and you get a menu, you then do option 1 "Create new file system" or some such.
Yeah, you just boot with the boot floppy and then get a nice little menu where you can "Initialize" or "Create" a new filesystem (don't remember exactly what the option was called but it's pretty obvious).
A hint: first backup your /etc directory on the filer to a unix machine so that you can easily restore the files there when you've re-initialized the toaster's filesystem.
Then you just issue a "download" command at the filer's administration prompt and it'll write the bootimage in /etc/boot to disk. Don't forget that or you won't be able to boot other than from floppy ;)
This takes a long time as it zeroes/initializes parity. I think it gives you an estimate of time...
Well I wouldn't rely too much on that - our F540 said it would take some 300 minutes to zero the disks but in reality it took about an hour I think.
maytag is popular. We've been using machine tool names "bosch", "makita".
Appliance brand names are fun: whirlpool, kenmore, etc.
:-) We named our F540 after a brewing company because the clients are all named after soda brands.
/Ragnar, Algonet/TNI
So, I've got two more questions, one semi-technical, and one not:
- How do you delete the file system on a NetApp? If I want to newfs the
file system, how do I do it?
I think you do a floppy boot and you get a menu, you then do option 1 "Create new file system" or some such.
This takes a long time as it zeroes/initializes parity. I think it gives you an estimate of time...
Note: we may need to work on the time estimates. They seem pretty pessimistic; I seem to remember recent ones with a 230 and ~ 50G disk estimating something like 4 hours, but actually completing in well under 2.
First off, thank you Dave for an excellent summary.
And now for a few comments:
FAServer 400 The first box. A black tower tower unit. The systems units held 7 GB and could do 400 ops/sec. (Hence the name.)
We've got one of these. It's got 7x2GB disks for 14 GB of disk space that, with parity and file system overhead comes out to about 10 GB of usable RAID storage. It's been in the back closet for almost a year now, but we still periodically think about playing with it again. If we don't find a production use for it soon, and if netapp doesn't offer a good trade in value for it, I think my boss is gonna let me take it home and play with it.
Originally they used 1GB disks - later it was 2GB. Eventually made it do about 700 ops/sec with the 2.1 software, I think. It was a horrible box to service. One could also get a second black box (expansion cabinet) to hold 7 more drives. They were connected externally by a SCSI cable.
This is a 486/50 CPU, EISA bus. Originally used the ASUS motherboard; later switch to the NICE.
FAServer 450 Same box, but with a faster CPU. Maybe we also allowed the expansion cabinet (a second black tower) at the same time.
We've got a few of these in use right now. These took 4 GB disks and had room for 14 disks inside (slightly bigger box, beige). I know we've got at least one, possible 2 or 3 still in production use. The one I know about has 7x2GB and 7x4GB for about 30 GB effective storage.
Right. The 450 was the much taller beige box which held 14 drives. It was not the black box.
F220 NUCLEAR BANANA BEZEL!!! Ahem. This is a cost
Got one of these. It does suport for some production machines, cuz we wanted to split off the F330, where the users constantly use up all the available space and take more, from the production NFS server, where we control and even, to some degree, predict how much space each service uses.
There are two version of the F220 system board, II and IIa.
So, I've got two more questions, one semi-technical, and one not:
- How do you delete the file system on a NetApp? If I want to newfs the
file system, how do I do it?
Boot off floppy and choose "install new file system".
- What are the various names people have given their machines? We've had
toaster, blender, fridge, icebox, tv, vcr, vaccuum, washer, compactor, furnace, and microwave. (No, we don't have that many netapps--some of these names are on different interfaces of the same boxes, or a box that was retired, and then reused elsewhere with a different name.)
We use a "power tools" theme in house:
makita bosch ryobi dewalt stanley
and so on.
Bruce
On Tue, 24 Jun 1997, Amy Chused wrote:
- What are the various names people have given their machines?
Sinagua.
Partly because that's one of the prehistoric peoples of Arizona, which is my name-the-servers theme, but mostly because it has such a good abbreviation.
-
Amy Chused -
beepy＠netapp.com -
Jim Davis -
Ragnar Lonn -
Richard Geiger -
sterling＠netapp.com