Receiving automatic technical support

Understanding the autosupport feature

What autosupport does

The autosupport daemon monitors the filer's operations and sends automatic messages to Network Appliance Technical Support to alert technical support to potential filer problems. If necessary, Network Appliance Technical Support contacts you at the e-mail address that you specify to help resolve a potential system problem. The autosupport daemon is enabled by default on the filer. The filer can send autosupport messages by SMTP, HTTP, or HTTPS (the secure socket layer [SSL] Internet transport protocol). HTTPS is the default.

Autosupport daemon requires an external mail host if you use SMTP

The filer does not function as a mail host--it requires an external mail host at your site to send mail. The mail host is a host that runs a mail server that listens on the SMTP port (25).

Examples of mail servers include the following:

A UNIX host running an SMTP server such as the sendmail program
A Windows NT server running the Microsoft Exchange server

The filer uses the mail host's mail server to send periodic e-mail messages automatically to Network Appliance Technical Support about the filer's status. You can configure autosupport to use one or more mail hosts.

Autosupport messages using HTTP/HTTPS

To use HTTP or HTTPS to send autosupport messages, you may need to configure an HTTP or HTTPS proxy. For more information, see Configuring autosupport.

HTTP uses port 80; HTTPS uses port 443. If the network connection does not allow HTTPS or HTTP, you must configure autosupport for SMTP.