RE: Automatic NFS export on vol create - toasters

18 Aug 2004

      Speaking purely for myself, as a long-time Sysadmin, the fact that so much
of Netapp's config is stored in text files was a *big* advantage to me.
Databases always seem like a good idea until they get corrupted, or the
front-end administration tools fail because of bad data.  (Anyone else ever
adminned AIX?  Hell, just the other day I had to spend a fair amount of time
trying to repair a corrupted registry on a Windows box.)
-- 
Mike Sphar - Sr Systems Administrator - Remedy, a BMC Software Company

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Haynes, Tom [mailto:thomas@netapp.com] 
Sent:	Wednesday, August 18, 2004 1:04 PM
To:	skeezics@selectmetrics.com
Cc:	toasters@mathworks.com
Subject:	Re: Automatic NFS export on vol create

Is it a dumbing down or an automation of common steps?  I know when
I designed and coded the automatic writing of the /etc/exports, my
goal was to remove some repetitive and manual steps.

You have to remember that is what programming is all about:
1) finding common blocks of functionality and wrapping them in a function.

2) reducing the human interaction.

Some of the posters on this thread make it sound like this was a
conspiracy.

If we had been a brand new company and we came out with a product
which kept the exports information in a database instead of a flat
file, would you have been this upset?  Or would you have enjoyed
the experience?

I've been of the flat file bent myself for a long time.  Now that
I have to maintain the exports file, I'm leaning towards a database
for it.  There is just too much ambiguity in parsing entries in
the host lists - well formed fields, like *shudder* XML, make too
much sense.

Anyway, there is no global plan to dumb down the product - just
local designs to reduce problems found in customer escalations.

> On Wed, 18 Aug 2004, Bruce Arden wrote:
> 
> Uh, whoops, now I've got this "/vol/new" export at the end of the file?
> Hmmm.  Harmless, in this case, because at reboot there was no volume named
> "new" so it wasn't exported... still, this was another little surprise
> that could have had more serious consequences, and as another long-time
> Unix/ONTAP hacker I have to lobby against the dumbing down of ONTAP.  Any
> sysadmin qualified to run the box can learn it in an hour or less; filers
> don't need to be much simpler than they are now.  What's next?  "Hey,
> Boeing, this 747 is too hard to fly, make it easier so we can use cheaper
> pilots."
> 
> Cringe.
> 
> -- Chris
> 

-- 
Tom Haynes, ex-cfb
thomas@netapp.com