watson@ics.de (Robert Watson) writes: [...]
I have created a qtree "/vol/vol0/home" and copied some users home directories into it, this seems to work well. But I am a bit puzzled how to implement the company hierarchy. I think that ideally "sales", "support", etc. would be separate qtrees - but it seems that qtrees can only exist at the top level, so this is not possible?
You are right: this is not possible. Currently, anyway: "qtrees not at top level" has been on the wish list for a long long time, but I don't get any feeling that NetApp are about to implement it.
Or, I could create "sales", "support", etc. as qtees directly at the top level but then users would have to mount each tree individually?
Yes. In the Unix/NFS world one typically does this by automounting, with /isc/sales mapping to filer:/isc_sales, /isc/support to filer:/isc_support, and so on. Easy for a fixed list, with most automounters not too difficult with an open-ended one either.
I am not too familiar with the equivalent apparatus for Windows/CIFS.
Or, I could create a single "company" qtree with the various functional directories under it... but then I would not be able to take advantage of qtree features such as having separate quotas and dumps for these different "functions".
Separate quota regimes do require separate qtrees, but the dumps don't. You can backup any specific directory tree, or indeed any set of directory trees in a volume, in a single dump: they don't have to be at top level. There are some efficiency advantages to dumping whole qtrees at a time, but this isn't likely to be a critical issue.
Chris Thompson Email: cet1@cam.ac.uk