I have been experimenting with ONTAP 6.2 (FCS), and run across a couple of [circumventable] problems I thought might be worth reporting to the list, in case anyone else was planning to upgrade at Easter...
The context is NFS access and client machines are Solaris 8 (although I would expect to see something similar for other Unix clients).
1. If you let the soft quotas for a per-user quota in /etc/quotas default, or specify them as "-", then the rquota RPC returns the values 4194300 KB (= 4GB-4KB) for the soft blocks limit, and -1 for the soft files limit. In previous releases these were always returned equal to the corresponding hard limits.
2. If you have a per-tree quota with a limit of "-" (i.e. only for reporting) and a mount point within that qtree, "df -k" (i.e. statvfs()) now reports the size of the filing system as equal to its actual usage, so it always appears 100% full. Previously the size was reported as the total size of the volume less the actual usage of other qtrees.
Neither of these stop files being allocated and extended. However there are paranoid programs around that won't even try to write a file if they believe the filing system is full, and so fail. [Solaris 8 ed(1) seems to be one such. Don't ask me who was using ed ... it wasn't me!] Also, the outputs of "quota -v" and "df -k" are of course confusing to the end-user.
The workrounds are easy if inelegant: (1) set the soft limits explicitly equal to the hard limits for all per-user quotas, & (2) use super-large numbers instead of "-" for the limits on per-tree quotas.
Chris Thompson Email: cet1@cam.ac.uk