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 :)
Lori Barfield wrote:
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?
On the contrary, they open a lot of possibilities for administrator to manage backups, quotas and sharing, for example. We have a policy to create only qtrees on volume roots instead of regular directories. And now flexvols give us tools to have different snapshot policies without wasting disk space etc. I personally like to separate different sharing profiles on different volumes. /vol/iscsi for iscsi luns (and a qtree for every igroup), /vol/home for home directories, /vol/projects for projects' shared data etc.
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Eino Tuominen -
Lori Barfield