-----Original Message----- From: dnb@ccs.neu.edu [mailto:dnb@ccs.neu.edu]

Dave Hitz hitz@netapp.com writes:

...

I also have a request. Please turn on autosupport. That's extremely important to us for two reasons:

Quick question: once upon a time, machine-gone-kablooey autosupport mail was only sent when a filer booted. It was the Yoda scenario ("there is no retry, only do!"). If something went awry in that sending, the message was just dropped on the floor, no queuing, no retrying.

We had a situation where our filer bounced twice, but on the first return to service it didn't have good net (or NIS, or name resolution, can't recall which). This meant that the first "here's the problem" mail never got to the mothership, but the "just booted, everything is peachy" mail did. Does the crash autosupport facility do anything more sophisticated these days? (he asks, because his filer hasn't crashed in many moons...).

ONTAP 5.3.4 got a change which has autosupport retry delivery for about 15 minutes. This should help with transient failures such as the mailhost rebooting, temporary loss of DNS, et cetera. In the "next major release" the retry interval has been boosted to an hour.

In addition, autosupport will wait until boot is fully complete before trying to do *anything*. This will prevent autosupport from issuing silly syslog messages saying it can't deliver mail because the network isn't up (prior to 5.3.4, that behavior could cause loss of a message, in 5.3.4 it is annoying/silly, and in the "next major release" it will go away completely).

---------------------------------------------------------------------- steve klinkner klink@netapp.com