NFS Question

pll at lanminds.com pll at lanminds.com
Fri Aug 30 12:37:44 EDT 2002


In a message dated: Thu, 29 Aug 2002 20:57:20 EDT
John Abreau said:

>I'd have to agree with this. Once you get past the sticker shock, the 
>NetApp appliances are awesome.

I didn't really think they were that expensive considering what they 
do, and the amount of storage they scale to.

>I found them to be fast and reliable, and the snapshot feature is a lifesaver.

Ahhh, it is a lifesaver, but the real trick is to *not* let your user 
base know about the snapshot feature.  That way you can appear even 
more magical and mystical to them when you recover a file from 3 days 
ago within minutes of the request.

Or, you recover it immediately, but don't tell them you have the file 
for 3 days, and let them know the amount of pain and agony you went 
through in order to restore their file from backups ;)

>If I recall correctly, the system retains 7 hourly and 7 nightly
>snapshots by default. So you can always recover a file to its 
>previous state from 1 hour ago, 2 hours, etc, and 1 day ago, 2 days ago, 
>etc.

This is also completely configurable.

My only complaint about the NetApps was that their OS, OnTap, was 
based on an older version of BSDI UNIX, and their /etc/exports file 
didn't have the options I wanted never mind the amount of flexibility 
that Linux's /etc/exports allows!

For example, you could export to a list of IPs, hostnames, or 
netgroups.  But you could only explicitly deny exports to a
list of IPs, which I found really annoying.

And their were no options for (no_)root_squash and many of the other 
really neat features Linux has.

Other than though, they're great!
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
--
	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
   but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.

	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!





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