Netapp filers can be accessed and managed many ways, including using Putty to SSH into the filer itself.  In addition to FilerView, there is also another web based tool called Netapp OnCommand  System Manager that is GUI based which gives a very nice graphical performance chart detailing how HOT your filers are running. The OnCommand tool is great for everyday management of the filers but sometimes you will need to access the filers via Putty to run more advanced functions , ie. killing a NDMP session that is hung.

We had an interesting issue today while trying to access one of our Netapp filers using Putty. Every time we would we try try to log  into the filer with a Putty session we would get an access denied or the Putty session would simply close. What was odd was that it didn’t happen for all of the us Storage Engineers. Thinking that maybe are accounts are locked or maybe  the access got removed I started the OnCommand session and attempted to log into the filers.

Not a single hiccup. Logged in right away on every single filer we have. hmmm….so I can log in with my credentials using OnCommand but when using a Putty session I can’t. Yet, another storage engineer can login to both and we all have the same permissions. All filers were checked for locked accounts including Active Directory, nothing was locked.

After some more head scratching one of the other Storage Engineers stumbled upon a setting within the OnCommand System Manager setting that was caching our passwords. Once the tick box to cache passwords was cleared we were able to  successfully log onto the filers.

To remove the cache passwords in OnCommand :

1. Run OnCommand System Manager and log onto any filer
2. In the top left hand corner select to Tools
3. Select Options         

4. Clear the Enable Cache Passwords tick box

1. Select Clear Existing Passwords

2. Select Save and Close
   

Once the settings were changed we were both able to Putty to the filers. Gotta Love the gotchas of cached passwords.