[SunRescue] NetApps?

[Hatle, Steven J.]

I got my NetApp at a large company surplus house for $50.00. It was
complete, but didn't have any software or disk drives. No one, including me
at the time, was exactly sure what it was, but I figured with the Network
Appliance logo on it I couldn't go wrong.

My model is a NFAS-450. This was the second box from NetApp, from what I can
tell. It's a generic 486-50 EISA motherboard, with an Adaptec 1740
controller, a cache card that's 4 meg of fast SIMM RAM that is battery
backed, a serial interface for the console, and 128 Meg of RAM on the
motherboard. It's a _big_ tower case with room for 14 disk drives
internally, two AT powersupplies, an open bay to the front for a tape drive,
which I don't have, and a floppy drive.

I was able to get the software (NFS only) from a de-commissioned (and
scrapped <frown>) NetApp at a friends workplace, and populated the box with
six 4 GB narrow SCSI disk drives. The whole software load comes on two
floppies- fire it up, it builds the RAID, and then installs it's
microkernel. After reboot, it asks you about 10 questions (IP address etc.,
NIS yes/no, couple of other things) and then you are done! 20 some GB of NFS
storage. . . tasty!

I've since been able to come into the last version of the software that
supports my box, and it has the first generation of CIFS support, so I can
share the same files as either Windows shares or NFS shares. This lets my
wife use all the MP3's from her Win98 laptop without needing an NFS client.

Later generations were Pentium machines, and currently I believe they are
all Alphas. I've played with the current product, and while there have been
many hardware and software improvements, a 2001 filer isn't _that_ different
from my 1994 filer. The OS still comes on two floppies, and it takes about
10 minutes to configure a basic install. I'd love a new one at work, and you
would have to make me a _very_very_ good offer to get my one at home away
from me!

Steve