A NetApp Technical Diary

Quick guide on how to NetBoot a NetApp FAS / IBM N-Series.

First of all you’ll want a netboot image and a home for it. You can get these from either NetApp or IBM, and you’ll want to make sure it’s the relevant ONTAP version for you. You’ll need either a web server, or TFTP server to put this on so that the filer can access this remotely and download it. The best bet to avoid any complications is to put this into the root directory of the TFTP / Web server, but if you are going to use this as a general storage area and refer to it more often, then you may want to drop it into it’s own folder, it will cause no issue.

At the CFE / Loader prompt on the filer, first thing is to configure some networking.

For DHCP on e0a…

ifconfig e0a -auto

To setup static networking on e0a…

ifconfig e0a -addr=10.0.0.1 mask=255.255.255.0

If you need, you can set a gateway “-gw=…”, dns server “-dns=…”, the network speed “-speed=1000fdx”, and also the MAC address “-hwaddr”. Please refer to ifconfig for further details on “ifconfig” at the CFE prompt.

Now we tell the filer to NetBoot from the image on the TFTP / Web server. In this example our Web server is 10.0.0.2. Please refer to netboot for further details on “netboot” at the CFE prompt.

netboot http://10.0.0.2/7261_netboot.q

This will then download and boot the filer into ONTAP 7.2.6.1 that I have placed on my local web server.

Once it has been NetBooted, don’t forget to re-install ONTAP again in full. The NetBoot contains only enough for the filer to function and boot, but doesn’t contain things like the FilerView and some other functions of the system. If you need to 4a (completely re-initialise) the system, NetBoot it, hit CTRL+C on boot when prompted, and 4a from here before again doing a full ONTAP install afterwards.  Read more... (359 words, estimated 1:26 mins reading time)

Web Searches N-Series, NetApp, netboot, ONTAP

One of the most useful commands. This can save you in certain scenarios, and can be a time saver in others (will go into this later).

Once you have the networking setup (use ifconfig), then point netboot at a http or tftp server that has a copy of the ONTAP netboot image. When the system has booted, you still need to install ONTAP fully.

CFE> help netboot

  SUMMARY

     Boots the supplied URL off the network.

  USAGE

     netboot <URL>
     Where <URL> is either <http or tftp>://<server>/<path to file>

     netboot loads an image of Data ONTAP or Diagnostics off of the network
     and executes it. It loads the image from the user supplied URL.
     The URL can be either a TFTP or an HTTP network path.

CFE / Loader Commands cfe, NetApp, netboot, ONTAP