Hi Lori,

Just thought I'd follow up about qtrees - we use just Windows and CIFS here generally, so I might be missing some subtlety about qtrees in a multiprotocol environment, but as I understand it, the one disadvantage of qtrees is that they can't be set up within Explorer. You need to use the console or Filerview.

The advantages of Qtrees on the other hand: - You can apply tree quotas to them - You can do NDMP backups of a single Qtree, rather than an entire volume (I believe you can do this on a non-qtree subtree, but it's slower) - You can do NDMPCopies of a single qtree - You can use QTree Snapmirror on a Qtree - If you use DFM, it will monitor the QTrees for you and produce pretty graphs of the qtrees over time, so you can tell approximately where the data growth in your organisation is.

The fact that most of our data is in QTrees is also aiding our migration to 7G as we can QSM all the data to new flexvols.

We have one chunk of data outside of a qtree due to an oversight, and if it didn't consume such a large proportion of the volume, I'd have moved it to a qtree long ago. I've deliberately restricted access to the volume root shares to just my team and advised them never to create a root level folder without making it a qtree.

I don't suppose anyone on the list can answer these questions?

- Is there an easy way of changing a non qtree root level directory to a qtree? I'm guessing the only way is to NDMPCopy the data to a new qtree? - Is there any way of getting DFM to monitor subtree growth, as well as qtrees? I'm guessing again that DFM uses the filer's in-built quota monitoring to do the qtree size measurement, and so there isn't any flexibility here?

Thanks!

-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com]On Behalf Of Lori Barfield Sent: 09 November 2005 17:43 To: John Stoffel; Greg.Libert@plexus.com Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: samba acls and Re: howto document for initial volume architecting?

thank you, greg and john, for the recommendations and the pdf links. i was not aware of FlexVols and it looks like this is suddenly going to be a much more challenging exercise. :)

i do have two followup questions right now, before i start untangling the reading in detail.

On 11/9/05, John Stoffel john.stoffel@taec.toshiba.com wrote:

Lori> our architecture is currently flat- one volume per filer with Lori> the data only split up into separate directories.

Are you using qtrees at all? I find them to be very useful.

i am still learning about the existing architecture but don't believe qtrees are in use. originally i was concerned about setting any up because i am not a permanent fixture here, and i should not leave an overly complex design in my wake. so it is important to create an architecture that makes sense but does not require a lot of close watching to avoid failures and admins learning a whole new command set to stay afloat. please correct me if my vague impression about qtrees is ignorant, but don't they make it that much more difficult to do the day-to-day work of maintaining filers?

Lori> all hosts can mount all directories on all volumes if needed.

Sure, makes sense. I assume you use permissions to keep people from touching what they shouldn't?

er, some work does need to be done here. with root and non-privileged access paradigms as well. good thing we get to work from scratch with the new filer. :)

i do have a question about samba; hope it's okay to present that here. right now our permissions are group-based...meaning that we seem to create a new custom group for every single shared dir. (want to add another user? new group on every unix workstation! :) and there is no NIS here in this Windows house; nsswitch.conf is not even understood.) so it's time to switch to acls, but here again is unfamiliar territory for me and concern about making it too hard for the next guy to figure out. is there a good how-to acls document for samba that might include the pitfalls of this approach?

thanks again!

...lori

(busy printing pdfs :)

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