Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Crititcal Windows Filesystem Issues

Well this is a copy from my other less TSM centric blog Storage Admin Blues but it needs to be known. Here is the post from February -

So I have been working a major data issue on a server with a certain Redmond operating system for almost a week now. As it turns out the afore mentioned OS has a known issue with volumes that contain over 4 million files. What happens is that the system will reboot after a patch or update is applied and on the startup begin a check-disk. That wouldn't be so bad but the check-disk strips permissions from almost all files. The response from Redmond was that we would have to restore the data if we want to fix the permissions. OK! Great! Restore 6 million files when the server is used 24/7. The volume in question is over 570GB space used and it has a gig-Ethernet connection. I swear if there isn't a conspiracy against storage administer when it comes to restore SLA's. I got called in to fix the problem and have had almost no sleep for a week, and in conjunction with that I have a virus that is causing me to cough incessantly and make it hard to breathe. Thank goodness for telecommuting or I'd be in the hospital by now. Lets just hope the people in charge listen this time (it has happened two times before this) when we warn about volume size/file management. If it wasn't for Arrested Development and Scrubs I would go nuts.

The resolution for this problem was to restore the directory structures and then have the system admins apply a script that cascaded the permissions to the files within the directory structure since they all inherited their permissions from the parent folder. We also decided to change the environment to backup all directory structures to disk and retain them there as long as possible before migrating to tape. So we had to use the migration delay and migration continue feature on the disk pool. Trust me restoring directories off of tape is no picnic...very slow. If you have run into something like this let me know how you resolved it. Sharing info is how we learn more and although the my e-mail might say TSM Expert, I'm don't know everything.

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