totally cheating here

Google search will certainly reveal this one, but if you are looking into upgrading (or building) your server infrastructure and heard about the benefits of blades instead of standalone rack servers, then Blades Made Simple (TM) is one of the sites that will take a lot of the guesswork out of why choose blades (and WHICH blades to choose).

This week, they are celebrating their one year anniversary with a free giveway. What they are giving away is anyone's guess (I vote for a Cisco UCS packed with B230's maxed to the gills in RAM). At a minimum, those lucky few selected can expect a bag of m&m's to be sent to them gratis.

If I win the m&m's, I will give it to a worthy cause. If I win a UCS, I am keeping it to myself. Sorry, my charitable nature only takes me so far.

Oh, and technically, they are calling it a "Bloggiversary", but I can't seem to call it that. It's like when the smurfs would take arbitrary words and replace it with smurf to give it more smurfiness.

Congrats, Blades Made Simple (TM) on the one year, keep up the informative posts.

NetApp, updates, and NDMP: what is this I don't even

So after upgrading from ONTAP 7.3.1 to 7.3.2P3, I get an alert from our NOC saying NDMP backups are failing. Passwords had not been changed on any accounts since the last good backup. I checked the changelogs between 7.3.1 and 7.3.2P3 and did not find anything related to NDMP.


Symptom:
NDMP backups fail, citing authentication errors.

An attempt to re-generate an NDMP password yields this error:


filer01> ndmpd password ndmpfiler01
Cannot generate NDMP password.

filer01> version
NetApp Release 7.3.2P3: Fri Dec 11 17:58:49 PST 2009


Cause:
Sometime between then and now, a new capability was added: login-ndmp. If an account does not have that capability, ndmp logins and password generations will fail.


Notes:
We have a least-privilege account used for backing up the filers. A role was created called ndmp_role with the following capabilities: cli-ndmpcopy*, cli-ndmpd* which worked in 7.3.1. In 7.3.2P3 (don't know which actual version introduced this), the capability was added. A role called backup was created with the login-ndmp capability. A group called "Backup Operators" was added that includes that role.



Solution:
Add your least-privilege ndmp account to the "Backup Operators" group. Once added, you can again perform an ndmp password command against that account.