The other day I was upgrading my Isilon cluster to 7.0.1.8.  Since I wanted to minimize customer impact I elected to do a rolling restart – something I’ve done several other times without problems.  Isilon has a feature in SmartConnect Advanced which allows the cluster to dynamically move IP addresses between nodes of the cluster.  What that means to my upgrade is when a node reboots, the IP address moves to a different node and my clients don’t notice the impact.   The entire upgrade process usually takes about 10 minutes per node. About three nodes into the rolling reboot, the node I was running the upgrade from, lost network connectivity in an unrelated problem. This stopped my upgrade process, leaving me running two different versions of OneFS.  The fix was actually pretty simple,  I had to restart my upgrade process.  In order to do that I had to stop the upgrade service which was already running onRead More →

By:
On:
In: Storage

One of the most annoying managements tasks of a Network Attached Storage is managing permissions for Windows files.  This is even further complicated using systems which allow for work Windows and Unix shares – Such as an EMC Isilon. If you haven’t picked it up by now,  i’m a command line guy with a strong unix background – so I don’t like using the windows GUI to control SMB permissions.  What I needed was really simple,  just to clone permissions (both unix and windows) from one file to another.  You can use setfacp/getfacl, but it’s kludgy and  deprecated in favor of ls/chmod.  So I came up with a simple perl script which can be ran on Isilon to clone permissions easily and quickly. As you can see in the example below permissions get cloned from <source> to <target>. [box]isilon-1# ls -led source -rwxrwx–x + 1 root wheel 1580 Mar 20 13:14 source OWNER: user:root GROUP: group:wheel CONTROL:dacl_auto_inherited,sacl_auto_inherited 0: user:DOMAINCincyStorageallow inherited file_gen_read,file_gen_write,file_gen_execute,std_write_dac,delete_child,inherited_aceRead More →

By:
On:
In: Storage

After seeing my Perl scripts for migrating from EMC Celerra to Isilon a few people have asked me how I moved my actually data from the source Celerra to my target Isilon. The answer is pretty simple: EMCOPY. EMCOPY is basically a fast version of robycopy used for moving data while maintain ACLs and permissions.. It’s CIFS/SMB centric and very easy to use. You run it from a windows machine with access to both shares and it copies data. I wrote a quick script to generate my EMCOPY commands based on my previous ones. Wanted to share that with everyone.     [box]Now it’s time for a short note and small disclaimer. This script works for me in my environment. Do your homework and make this work for you. While I have tried to make this robust and fully functional, it’s important to note “stuff happens”, this is still provides “as is” with no warranty whatsoever. UseRead More →

By:
On:
In: Storage

I’ve been working on a massive migration from an EMC Celerra to our new shiny Isilon. We’ve got a ton of file systems, CIFS, and NFS shares which I don’t want to re-create manually. “Work Smarter, Not Harder” is what Scrooge McDuck always said, right? So I created a few simple Perl scripts to export information from the Celerra Control Station and created a shell script to run on Isilon to migrate the directories and shares. I’ve only tested with with 6.5 – not sure of the change in syntax in 7.x. This doesn’t actually move the data or the permissions, as that is a whole different project. It simply parses a “nas_fs” query to make directories, create a hard quota to mimic sizes, and then created the NFS and SMB share. It’s a set of three scripts that can be run as needed. [box]Now it’s time for a short note and small disclaimer. This script worksRead More →

By:
On:
In: Storage