NetApp CIFs Tricks

Yes, the Cisco UCS blog posts will start up "soon".  Still putting the finishing touches on the first port.  In the meantime...

I recently had to perform the following during a CIFs (Windows File Sharing) installation from a NetApp storage controller.  The chances of me remembering this again aren't very good so I wanted to post it here for later.  We had two issues that caused us some grief.

Issue #1 - For whatever reason when looking for a domain controller it wasn't "attaching" to the local domain controller.  The system would ask for a list of domain controllers but then try to communicate with remote AD servers, some of which were behind firewalls.  NetApp is nice enough to allow us to "pin" the storage to a preferred list of domain controllers to correct this behavior.  From the command line, use the following commands:

• cifs domaininfo - lists which domain controllers the NetApp is communicating with.  The preferred list is a list you specify, the favored list is the list AD thinks are closet to you, and then the rest are listed.
• cifs prefdc - This command allows you to populate a list of the domain controllers you want to communicate with first.  More than one can be entered in the command seperated by spaces in the format: cifs prefdc add (domain) (dc1) (dc2) (etc...)
• cifs resetdc - After a dc is added you need to reset the connection
• cifs prefdc print - Shows the list

 Issue #2 - The site admin wasn't a domain admin.  This leads to many permission related issues because by default when a NetApp is added to AD only the local NetApp admin (created during CIFS setup) and the Domain Admins are in the machine administrators group.  We needed to add the site admin into the Administrators group on the NetApp.  This was achieved using the useradmin command.  Here is the syntax: useradmin domainuser add (username) -g Administrators

After these two steps were complete, we were able to proceed.