SHIFT-WIKI - Sjoerd Hooft's InFormation Technology
This WIKI is my personal documentation blog. Please enjoy it and feel free to reach out through blue sky if you have a question, remark, improvement or observation. See below for the latest additions, or use the search or tags to browse for content.
Change NetApp Filer IP Address And Hostname
Summary: How to change the IP address on a Netapp Filer.
Date: Around 2015
Refactor: 7 March 2025: Checked links and formatting.
Changing the IP address of a NetApp filer is easy enough. The ONTAP operating system allows the use of the ifconfig command which is not that hard to use. What is a little bit harder is making sure the filer keeps working if it has a partner for failover functionality. My approach changes the IP address, the hostname and all other options I could find that are necessary to successfully change the IP information without a reboot. By editing the /etc/rc and the /etc/hosts files you can change the current configuration and make sure the changes are persistent over reboots. Afterwards a few settings need to change as well.
NetApp - Designing your disks, raids and aggregates
Summary: Keep this in mind when designing storage on a Netapp Filer.
Date: Around 2015
Refactor: 7 March 2025: Checked links and formatting.
When configuring a NetApp and designing the aggregate size there is something really important to keep in mind. So bear with me while I write it down. In a NetApp filer are disks. Disks themselves are point of failures, and that's why we use RAID. In this story I'll keep to raid_dp, which stand for raid double parity. This means that in each raid set that is configured two disks can fail before you're screwed. However, since NetApps work with WAFL (write anywhere file layout) you as a administrator don't work with disks and RAID, you work with aggregates and volumes. Also consider, that if you add disks to an aggregate they are automatically added to the RAID until it is full and a new RAID set will be created. Now a raid_dp set can contain up to 28 disks, but the default is 16. That means that if you have 20 disks, and don't change the default two RAID sets will be created, one containing 16 disks, and one containing 4 disks. That means two things: First, you loose 4 disks to parity, two to spare and you only keep 14 disks left for actual storage. Second, large RAID sets operate faster than small raid sets. That is because more disks can write at the same time in a large raid set (sales will tell you they're both evenly fast but ask any netapp engineer and he'll tell you the same.). So this meams you get an aggregate that's slow, since it will be as fast as the slowest RAID set. Than a final note, keep in mind the maximum size for an aggregate on a NetApp ONTAP 7.3 filer is 16 TB. So keep all this in mind when you're designing your aggregates.
note: You cannot remove disks from an aggregate! This is very important, so grow your aggregates with caution, it's easy to grow, impossible to shrink. If you've grown your aggregate too much then you'll need to destroy it to regain those spares.
This wiki has been made possible by:
AIX FTP
Summary: ALthough AIX is by now on version 7.3 I find these old pages so fascinating I decided to keep them. On this page I'll show you how to enable FTP in a secure way for multiple users. This page is for AIX 5.3 and 6.1.
Date: Between 2010-2013
Refactor: 21 December 2024: Checked formatting.
NetApp AutoSupport
Summary: How to setup NetApp AutoSupport with a proxy after upgrading to ontap 8.1.
Date: Around 2015
Refactor: 7 March 2025: Checked links and formatting.
After our upgrade from ontap 7.3.4 to 8.1 NetApp/IBM had a little surprise for us… autosupport stopped working! Now let's get this straight. You need autosupport. If a disk fails, the filer communicates to NetApp/IBM and there you go, depending on your contract you get a new disk delivered. And that's just one of the benefits, they also check for configuration errors and if you have an issue they will always ask you to provide an autosupport. Or, as they call it, an asup ;) . So you need this, and after some checking it turned out that ontap 8.1 dropped support for smtp as transport method, and only supported https. So that meant configuring a proxy that didn't require authentication etc. I keep the configuration listed here as a reference for myself, but maybe someone else also has a use for it:
filer01> options autosupport autosupport.cifs.verbose off autosupport.content complete (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.doit USER_TRIGGERED (test1601) autosupport.enable on (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.from filer01_ @ _getshifting.com (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.local_collection on (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.mailhost 172.16.100.150 (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.max_http_size 10485760 (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.max_smtp_size 5242880 (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.minimal.subject.id hostname (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.nht_data.enable on (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.noteto (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.partner.to (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.payload_format 7z (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.performance_data.doit DONT autosupport.performance_data.enable on (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.periodic.tx_window 1h (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.retry.count 15 (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.retry.interval 4m (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.support.enable on (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.support.proxy 172.16.150.100:80 (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.support.put_url eccgw01.boulder.ibm.com/support/electronic/nas (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.support.to callhome@de.ibm.com (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.support.transport https (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.support.url eccgw01.boulder.ibm.com/support/electronic/nas (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.throttle on (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.to sjoerd_ @ _getshifting.com (value might be overwritten in takeover) autosupport.validate_digital_certificate on (value might be overwritten in takeover)
Note that email is still used to send an copy from the autosupport to the “autosupport.to” address and that IBM/NetApp confirms receiving your autosupport test as well to the same email address: