I fully agree that a 'check but don't fix' feature would be very helpful but we made the experience that wafliron do not touch any productive files.

We recently had the problem that snapvault refused to run because of an inconsistent file system. It was a volume of about 270 GB and 10m files. As this volume hosted the internet presence of a big customer, we had little chance to take it offline and were understandably doubtful to use wafliron without knowing what we have to expect.

So we made a test run on a less critical volume and it turned out to be a quite useful tool. It runs in the background with low priority but nervertheless I would recommend to run it over night. In our case it took about 4 hours to finish and it moved about 1500 files into the lost+found directory. Obviously all of them were already "invisible" as the internet presence was not affected. Afterwards our problem was solved.

Of course I can only speak about our case and can not give you any guarantee... Perhaps you are able to do a volume snapmirror to backup your data before running wafliron (that is what we did), because volume snapmirror is working on block level whereas qtree snapmirror and snapvault are working on file level.

Regards

Thorsten Lemke

"Garrett Burke" garrett.burke@eircom.net@mathworks.com on 02.09.2003 16:24:40

Please respond to garrett.burke@eircom.net

Sent by: owner-toasters@mathworks.com

To: "Toasters (E-mail)" toasters@mathworks.com cc: "Philip Boyle (E-mail)" philip.boyle@eircom.net, "Sam McKenna (E-mail)" sam.mckenna@eircom.net Subject: Wafliron/WAFL_check in read only mode/tell me if something is wrong, but don't fix mode

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Hi,

Due to a snapmirror failing issue, NetApp support have advised us to run wafliron (online) or WAFL_check (offline) on the source volume. They have advised us that there's no way to check a volume while online for errors - a 'tell me if I need to run WAFL_check in fix mode, but don't do anything now' (I realise that WAFL_check prompts before fixing)

The issue is that we do not want to schedule offline maintenance with an unkown end time when we don't know if there's anything wrong with the filesystem. We expect that the check to take several hrs as we have 13.5m files & 340G in the volume.

Have other run into this before? I see the lack of 'check while online, but don't fix' as a serious flaw with OnTap.

Thanks, GB

---- Garrett Burke, Service Implementation & Support Manager, Eircomnet. http://www.eircom.net

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