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Requirements for using AutoSupport

AutoSupport provides flexible delivery options. You can choose the format in which AutoSupport provides information to technical support: HTTPS, HTTP, and SMTP, as well as other proxy configurations that meet your networking and security requirements. All of these protocols run on IPv4 or IPv6, based on the address family to which the name resolves.

Supported protocols

If you enable AutoSupport to send messages to technical support, you can use any of the following transport protocols:
Protocol and port Description
HTTPS on port 443 This is the default protocol. You should use this whenever possible.

The certificate from the remote server is validated against the root certificate, unless you disable validation.

The delivery uses an HTTP PUT request. With PUT, if the request fails during transmission, the request restarts where it stopped. If the server receiving the request does not support PUT, the delivery uses an HTTP POST request.

HTTP on port 80 This protocol is preferred over SMTP.

The delivery uses an HTTP PUT request. With PUT, if the request fails during transmission, the request restarts where it left off. If the server receiving the request does not support PUT, the delivery uses an HTTP POST request.

SMTP on port 25 You should use this protocol only if the network connection does not allow HTTPS or HTTP, because SMTP can introduce limitations on message length and line length.

If you configure AutoSupport with specific email addresses for your internal support organization, or a support partner organization, those messages are always sent by SMTP.

For example, if you use the recommended protocol to send messages to technical support and you also want to send messages to your internal support organization, your messages would be transported using both HTTPS and SMTP, respectively.

AutoSupport limits the maximum file size for each protocol. The default setting for HTTP and HTTPS transfers is 10 MB. The default setting for SMTP transfers is 5 MB. If the size of the AutoSupport message exceeds the configured limit, AutoSupport delivers as much of the message as possible. You can edit the maximum size by modifying AutoSupport configuration. See the options man page for more information.

Configuration requirements

Use of HTTP or HTTPS protocols requires additional configuration of the proxy URL. If you use HTTP or HTTPS to send AutoSupport messages to technical support and you have a proxy, you must identify the URL for that proxy. If the proxy uses a port other than the default port, which is 3128, you can specify the port for that proxy. You can also specify a username and password for proxy authentication.

If you use SMTP to send AutoSupport messages either to your internal support organization or to technical support, you must configure an external mail server. The storage system does not function as a mail server; it requires an external mail server at your site to send mail. The mail server must be a host that listens on the SMTP port (25), and it must be configured to send and receive 8-bit Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) encoding. Example mail hosts include a UNIX host running an SMTP server such as the sendmail program and a Windows server running the Microsoft Exchange server. You can have one or more mail hosts.