On 18/06/2007, at 10:16 PM, Francois Joubert wrote:
I would like to manage the symlinks in use for the whole company at a certain directory depth on our filers (FAS3050 + OnTap 7.2.2).
[snip]
I am aware that I need to configure the widelinks option. How do I create the symlinks from my admin host (FreeBSD) which mounts all the volumes over NFS for data management purposes?
Symlinks are a concept which does not exist in Windows or CIFS, so you must create the symlink in an NFS environment. Your FreeBSD box can do that.
You need an effective path virtualization scheme which works cross-platform, so that there are equivalent virtual paths available in both your UNIX and Windows environments. The Windows and UNIX paths do not need to be identical (indeed they cannot be) but it is helpful if they are as similar as practical.
For instance, we have a system where a UNIX virtual path: /path/to/a/file always has a Windows equivalent T:\path\to\a\file
Your choice of drive letter may vary, but using a drive letter (only one required for the whole virtual name space) frees you from the ugliness of UNC paths.
You can do this in UNIX by using an automounter or (yuk) hand-edited fstab files.
On the Windows end, using widelinks (which are just symlinks the filer uses to generate CIFS referrals) are an option, but consider also using DFS, which runs on a Windows server and are IMHO easier to manage than widelinks. We use our domain controllers as DFS servers, the load is not great even with hundreds of clients.
You can also get third party products to do this sort of thing. One option is VFM (from NetApp) but there are others which may also be cross-platform.
The big deal whatever you do is to organize your paths so that the paths the user sees do not depend on where the data is actually stored. That way you can move the data around without your users having to update embedded path names.
HTH, Jeremy
ps. symlinks are like goto statements, use them sparingly and wisely!
-- Jeremy Webber Senior Systems Engineer Animal Logic Pty Ltd Phone: +61 2 9383 4837 Fax: +61 2 9383 4801 Switch: +61 2 9383 4800