I've never been much of a fan of NetApp devices after a previous employer had a full rack of disks for it's NetApp device which had this horrible interface and would randomly hang NFS connections. Years later I was told by a friend who worked for NetApp that it was due to it being the old OS and that the new "ontap" OS was way better (I was still skeptical). Well today I encountered my first NetApp filer device since then and it's left me just saying... wtf?

This NetApp is running ontap version 7.3 and when scanning the SMB port on it I manage to get access to the registry. Wait what? Why does NetApp's proprietary operating system, ontap, have a windows registry? Well ok so the people at NetApp are fond of the registry for some reason and implemented it in there own operating system, it should be pretty easy to distinguish between an ontap registry and a windows registry. Wrong again... Turns out that the registry key (SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion) to check the version of windows also exists in the ontap registry.

---Eric Kinolik