Thanks for all of your advice.

 

Snapmirror was suggested and we do have a license for it – it’s been used for a few months to move our databases from filer to filer.  Before I feel comfortable using it for ‘just data” I’d want to practice in our development environment.  I’ll make that a to-do, then.

 

I did use ndmpcopy with level 0, 1, and 2 then eliminate the soft link to the old volume.  I’ll give it another day and then I’ll 0 eliminate the data on the source volume.

 

The only gotcha was that in my finely crafted checklist I neglected to add ‘edit the nfs export’ so the volume can be mounted as RW.  So following the cutover I could not add files to the destination volume.  Luckily while it was in production this way for about 10 minutes no one noticed; that volume is used by  our BOM system for attachments and while they reference it a great deal on the 3rd shift the folks who make changes are 1st shift guys.

 

Thanks for all your advice and pointers.

 

 

From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Brian Dunbar
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 3:44 PM
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: ndmpcopy and the newb

 

Hi,

I'm new to managing Filers - I hope you'll put up with a newb question or two while I get on my feet.  I've not been left entirely on my own here - but there are two unix guys here to mange a lot of servers where before there were four of us .. and the two guys who had done this job previously are the ones who left for greener pastures.  So I've got a mature and reasonably stable infrastructue to work with at least.


My first task is to move a volume from a busy filer to a non-busy filer. 

1. The preferred method (for our shop, I'm told) is to use ndmpcopy

I've got shell access to both filers, they can ping each other. I've got a desination volume created.

ndmpcopy [options] source destination

The source and destination specify a hostname (no problem) and aboslute pathname of the directory to be used for the transfer.  Does this mean the absolute pathname of the source/destination volume?  Or .. something else?  If the former how do I find that?

2. Unless there is a better way to do this?  I can of course mount both volumes via NFS from a 3rd host and simply move then but (from what I've read) ndmpcoy is a better choice.

Brian Dunbar
Plexus
brian.dunbar@plexus.com