Summary: How to setup NetApp AutoSupport with a proxy after upgrading to ontap 8.1.
Date: Around 2015
Refactor: 7 March 2025: Checked links and formatting.

After our upgrade from ontap 7.3.4 to 8.1 NetApp/IBM had a little surprise for us… autosupport stopped working! Now let's get this straight. You need autosupport. If a disk fails, the filer communicates to NetApp/IBM and there you go, depending on your contract you get a new disk delivered. And that's just one of the benefits, they also check for configuration errors and if you have an issue they will always ask you to provide an autosupport. Or, as they call it, an asup ;) . So you need this, and after some checking it turned out that ontap 8.1 dropped support for smtp as transport method, and only supported https. So that meant configuring a proxy that didn't require authentication etc. I keep the configuration listed here as a reference for myself, but maybe someone else also has a use for it:

filer01> options autosupport
autosupport.cifs.verbose     off
autosupport.content          complete   (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.doit             USER_TRIGGERED (test1601)
autosupport.enable           on         (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.from             filer01_ @ _getshifting.com (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.local_collection on         (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.mailhost         172.16.100.150 (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.max_http_size    10485760   (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.max_smtp_size    5242880    (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.minimal.subject.id hostname   (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.nht_data.enable  on         (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.noteto                      (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.partner.to                  (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.payload_format   7z         (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.performance_data.doit DONT
autosupport.performance_data.enable on         (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.periodic.tx_window 1h         (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.retry.count      15         (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.retry.interval   4m         (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.support.enable   on         (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.support.proxy    172.16.150.100:80 (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.support.put_url  eccgw01.boulder.ibm.com/support/electronic/nas (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.support.to       callhome@de.ibm.com (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.support.transport https      (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.support.url      eccgw01.boulder.ibm.com/support/electronic/nas (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.throttle         on         (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.to               sjoerd_ @ _getshifting.com (value might be overwritten in takeover)
autosupport.validate_digital_certificate on         (value might be overwritten in takeover)

Note that email is still used to send an copy from the autosupport to the “autosupport.to” address and that IBM/NetApp confirms receiving your autosupport test as well to the same email address:

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