And a few other neat tricks worth checking out if you use this feature.
Matt.
________________________________________________________________
Matthew Brookes mailto:mbrookes@netapp.com
Systems Engineer http://www.netapp.com
Network Appliance Tel: +353 1 4064600
Unit 36, Rathfarnham Gate Fax: +353 1 4064601
Dublin 14, IRELAND Mob: +353 86 8575127
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Lamb [mailto:skeezics@measurecast.com]
Sent: 29 September 2000 08:05
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: Re: Optimal volume size
On Thu, 28 Sep 2000, Todd C. Merrill wrote:
On Tue, 26 Sep 2000, Moshe Linzer wrote:
Jeffrey Krueger wrote:
On Wed, Sep 20, 2000 at 09:23:04AM +0200, Eli Lopez wrote:
Aieee! EATTRIB2DEEP!
BTW, you can create a soft link on the filer called
QTREE1 pointing to
/vol/vol1/QTREE1 and mount using the link name.
Cool! I didn't know the NetApp could internally
resolve symlinks for
NFS/CIFS exports/shares and still give us the "right
stuff" from rquotad
and what not.
Yeah, the same trick allows us to share our CIFS homedirs
under a single
root, without actually moving the user's home directory.
Whoa. What's this? I knew symlinks if resolved on the same
filesystem on a filer work correctly under CIFS, but this seems
different. You can symlink across *volumes* on the same
filer and it is
transparent to NFS and CIFS clients???
<Scratches chin, tries to think back, way back, to the late 1900's...>
Y'know, I can't recall exactly now, but I thought we tried
that trick on a
filer running an early 5.x release... when we went from a
pure, pristine
NFS-only shop to the bag of rabid weasels that is a mixed CIFS/NFS
environment, we had to figure out how to map a flat /home/users/*
namespace into CIFS shares. Only our /home/users was really populated
with symlinks to about a dozen separate subdirectories of a
users qtree,
which segregated them according to groups, so that NFS
exports of those
groups could be divided into netgroups of machines that were
owned by said
groups. (Phew! Say that five times fast.) I.e., we could restrict
exports to some machines so that they could only "see" home
directories
for users in that group, but on shared central servers we
could mount the
parent of the users tree and see everything. Given the (political)
circumstances that necessitated this somehwat bizarre
arrangement, this
was Very clean. Nee, even elegant in its own way.
And, of course, Windows choked on it like month-old leftovers.
Because cifs.home_dir only accepted one directory argument to do its
magic, we were stuck. We had a bunch of separate roots, not
just one, so
now typing "cifs shares" on said filer produces something
resembling the
Portland Metro Area phone book. My, how we scroll! (I'm
sure the folks
that read the autosupport mail have probably seen worse, though. :-)
So I put in an RFE a couple of years ago to expand the cifs.home_dir
option to accept multiple paths, rather than just a single
directory.
Like setting $PATH to a colon-separated list in any Unix shell:
/vol/vol0/users/dirA:/vol/vol0/users/dirB:/vol/vol1/users/dirC
I think someone else had already submitted that one too,
around the same
time.
"So, how is any of this relevant to the discussion at hand?"
I hear you
cry.
In glancing over the 6.0 release notes, I *thought* I read
that this very
RFE has finally been included in the release. So, rather
than worry about
directories of symlinks or the vagaries of resolving them
across volumes
in a mixed NFS/CIFS environment, you can simply set cifs.home_dir to a
collection of paths and be done with it. Hooray! Of course,
I'm far too
tired to log into NOW and look for it and see if this is, indeed, the
case, so don't take my word for it. I've had enough caffeine today to
incapacitate a large barnyard animal.
OKAY, so sleep is overrated. I went and looked. Bug ID
13856 is the RFE
that caught my eye, but it doesn't quite describe the thing I
requested,
although it does appear to add some interesting
functionality, although
it's full of Windows goop and not what I was describing with the path
idea. Bzzzt. Sorry to get your hopes up. Please play again soon.
It's funny is that I really can't remember if we tried setting
cifs.home_dir to the directory full of symlinks or not. We
must have.
Really. I've probably blocked out the whole sordid affair.
If that had
worked in 5.2.x and we could have avoided defining and maintaining all
those separate shares, by hand, for every bloomin' user... but heck,
that's what we have NT admins for. :-)
Nowadays I'm unencumbered by such restraints and I have one nice flat
/home, and cifs.home_dir works famously. Still, even though
I don't have
a need for it anymore, I think having cifs.home_dir take a $PATH-style
argument would be a spiffy feature. Don't you agree,
Toastadminarians?
Cheers!
-- Chris
--
Chris Lamb, Unix Guy
MeasureCast, Inc.
503-241-1469 x247
skeezics@measurecast.com
Brookes, Matt
Todd C. Merrill