Not that I don't think having the option of booting from network is a good idea, but are people really booting from their floppies that often? Of the three filers I have in production, the only time I've ever had to boot them from floppies was during initial install and for firmware upgrades. I haven't booted off floppy for an OnTap upgrade in a long time, in fact I can't remember ever doing it, though I may have with much earlier versions.
One of the things I love most about the filers is being able to do a live OS upgrade, with only a very few minutes of downtime for the reboot afterwards.
Not that I don't think having the option of booting from network is a good idea, but are people really booting from their floppies that often?
I agree, booting off floppy is exceptionally rare, especially combined with 'floppy-boot? true'. The biggest problem is the dependence on floppy boots for firmware upgrades -- we've got a 720 that's 3000+ miles away in a colo rack w/ no available hands to insert a floppy for us.
I'd gladly be willing to donate a few megs off of one disk to hold a firmware upgrade images (ala. the upgrade procededures on a sparc). I don't expect it to be flash'able from the ontap shell, but something short of having to contract/fly someone to the east coast for an upgrade would be nice...
..kg..
Mike Sphar mikey@Remedy.COM writes:
Not that I don't think having the option of booting from network is a good idea, but are people really booting from their floppies that often? Of the three filers I have in production, the only time I've ever had to boot them from floppies was during initial install and for firmware upgrades. I haven't booted off floppy for an OnTap upgrade in a long time, in fact I can't remember ever doing it, though I may have with much earlier versions.
Well, from memory, for "my" F740 in the past 12 months,
once to do a firmware upgrade (2.2_a2 => 2.3_a2); several times to verify that the boot floppies I had made for a new ONTAP version were good;
[those during scheduled interuptions to service, of course]
and once, and this was a life-saver, and probably saved us several hours of downtime, when we fell foul of bug #19142, and I was able to get the broken volume offline in maintenance mode.
Hal Siegel hal.siegel@amd.com wrote:
I've also been trying to convinceNetapp that they need to change "boot from floppy" to "boot from CD" ever since the boot disk became two disks. (heck, I still have some floppies floating around somewhere from the days that the entire OnTap OS fit on a 3.5" ...)
A problem here is that many customers will have local floppy-writing capability but not CDROM-writing capability. So upgrading would either involve the shipping of physical CDROMs from NetApp, or being prepared to live with having only back-version bootable external media.
Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service, Email: cet1@ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG, Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.
The entire OS could still fit on a floppy, if Network Appliance upgraded the floppy drive that is installed on filers.
Superfloppy (LS-120) drives are well known for their backward compatability, making them suitable for environments that only support the 1.44MB floppy format. And with 120MB of storage, it can handle a full OS installation, several times over; making it an adequate media for OS revisions to come.
A side comment here: To support an environment where the boot floppy would be kept in the drive at all times, Network Appliance would also need to provide a mechanism to prevent booting from it all the time. Similar to boot sequence option in modern PC BIOS', or a Sun OpenBoot Prom option to specify the boot sequence. (setenv boot-device floppy disk net) Of course a 'boot floppy' (or disk or net) would override the boot sequence specification.
Chris Thompson wrote:
Mike Sphar mikey@Remedy.COM writes:
Not that I don't think having the option of booting from network is a good idea, but are people really booting from their floppies that often? Of the three filers I have in production, the only time I've ever had to boot them from floppies was during initial install and for firmware upgrades. I haven't booted off floppy for an OnTap upgrade in a long time, in fact I can't remember ever doing it, though I may have with much earlier versions.
Well, from memory, for "my" F740 in the past 12 months,
once to do a firmware upgrade (2.2_a2 => 2.3_a2); several times to verify that the boot floppies I had made for a new ONTAP version were good;
[those during scheduled interuptions to service, of course]
and once, and this was a life-saver, and probably saved us several hours of downtime, when we fell foul of bug #19142, and I was able to get the broken volume offline in maintenance mode.
Hal Siegel hal.siegel@amd.com wrote:
I've also been trying to convinceNetapp that they need to change "boot from floppy" to "boot from CD" ever since the boot disk became two disks. (heck, I still have some floppies floating around somewhere from the days that the entire OnTap OS fit on a 3.5" ...)
A problem here is that many customers will have local floppy-writing capability but not CDROM-writing capability. So upgrading would either involve the shipping of physical CDROMs from NetApp, or being prepared to live with having only back-version bootable external media.
Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service, Email: cet1@ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG, Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.
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Chris Thompson -
kevin graham -
Matthew Stier -
Mike Sphar