One thing to note is that if you are running in a multiprotocol environment you may find some snapshot files inaccessable through windows.
The reason: If you access a file via NFS only and later try to view/recover that file from a snapshot directory with windows the result will be permission denied. This is because the first time you access a file with windows it converts the filename to unicode format. It can't do this inside a snapshot since it is a read only filesystem.
There are cifs and wafl options you can set to avoid this.
You noted that later you could access the file via w2k.... was it the same snapshot or a later snap? I suspect if you were doing a filer wide virus scan then the file would have been touched (in the live directory) thus converting it to unicode....
Just a thought....
Don
Steve Losen <scl@sasha.acc.virginia.edu> Sent by: owner-toasters@mathworks.com
2002-05-09 09:59 AM
To: toasters@mathworks.com
cc:
Subject: Do file locks affect snapshots?
We are running ONTAP 6.1.1R2.
I thought I read somewhere that there are no file locks in a snapshot.
The snapshot is read only, but no files are locked, so you can open
any file if you have the necessary permissions.
However, I was running a virus scan (Norton) on a snapshot and it
failed to open a few files, according to the log. I'm pretty sure it
was not a permissions problem. We use unix passwd authentication for CIFS
and therefore all files have unix permissions. The CIFS user was
root (uid 0) and Norton successfully scanned about 180,000 files, many
of which are readable only by owner (and superuser). Norton failed to
open 16 files. Here is an error from the log:
Scan could not open file F:\weekly.0\a\af\afc3f\private\Disparity.doc
[00000012]
(We made a read only share out of the .snapshot directory and attached it to
drive F)
So that got me wondering about file locks. If a file is locked when
a snapshot is created, is the lock included in the snapshot? And if
so, does it lock the file in the snapshot?
Or else, if a file in the active filesystem is currently locked, does that
affect access to the corresponding file in a snapshot?
Later on, using the same share as above, I was able to copy the file to
the local desktop, so W2000 was able to open it.
Maybe it's a Norton thing. I'll try and look up that error code
[00000012]. Is this a CIFS error perhaps?
By the way, Norton failed to open some other files with error code [00000003]
but the ones I checked were all symlinks that the filer could not
follow, so that makes perfect sense.