Attempting to setup a NetApp 3070 from scratch. What does that mean “from scratch”? It means the NetApp doesn’t have Ontap installed and just continually reboots.
You’ll see something like this on the console.
WARNING: there do not appear to be any disks attached to the system.
Check that disks have been assigned ownership to this
system (ID 118044872) using the ‘disk show’ and ‘disk assign’
commands from maintenace mode.
No root volume found.
Rebooting… (press ctrl-c during boot to break reboot loop)
Console you say? Let’s back track, my first struggle was getting kermit (ckermit) to talk to the NetApp on it’s console interface. You’d think this would be simple but it took some work.
My first attempt was to use Ubuntu Linux on ESXi 4.1 host and while I could get output from the Netapp I could not type anything. I played with the flow control to no avail. Did some digging and found a VMware KB that say pass-through on the serial ports isn’t supported.
So I moved over to a physical linux box and a real UART. Installed ckermit and got the same result as the linux VM. Started experimenting and found this .kermrc to work for me.
set modem type none set line /dev/ttyS0 set speed 9600 SET CARRIER-WATCH OFF
The key was the “set modem type none”.
In a future post I’ll show you how I got a Ubuntu Linux VM to work with the ESXi 4.1 host serial port.