Hello Meik, Tuesday, December 16, 2008, 12:58:49 PM, you wrote:
MH> On Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:12:55 -0500 MH> Bob Doolittle <[email protected]> wrote: >> I can't argue there :) Plus you get the awesome ZFS Time Slider. Might >> be a while before you see that in opensuse... MH> How network-transparent is the timeslider? Does it work with NFS-mounted homes MH> (the NFS server using ZFS)? MH> Is a configuration with 100 users making individual snapshots of their MH> homes really feasible? Not that it's a Sun Ray topic, but... I've checked on a test server (sol10u6), the snapshots are visible to a NFS client (sol10u4) as a tree of dirs under ZFSMOUNTDIR/.zfs/snapshots/SNAPSHOTNAME You enable this by making snapshots visible and creating a few: [r...@server /]# zfs set snapdir=visible pool/export/home [r...@server /]# zfs create snapshot pool/export/home/usern...@20081216-test [r...@client /]# ls -la /net/server/export/home/username/.zfs/snapshots/20081216-test/ ... Snapshot views are "implemented" within the ZFS filesystem dataset and don't incur an additional mountpoint, neither in the original server's filesystem hierarchy nor in the NFS client's one. They are added and removed as soon as I create and destroy the ZFS snapshots on the server. Note that I did not check the ZFS timeslider GUI, but only the underlying technology - it's functional. Since for the client the homedir is an NFS mount, I'm not sure whether you can send a request from the client system to the NFS server to make a ZFS snapshot on-demand. I guess you can do that via ssh and password-less keys, but I wonder if there's any RPC call via NFS directly. I didn't actually try to research this, though. I think (but I'm not in any way authoritative) that the Windows server allows its "shadows" to be managed over CIFS protocol (perhaps RPC inside). Finally, one more thing to consider when you give out ZFS homes and implement automatic snapshots is quotas. Originally ZFS had attributes "quota" and "reservation" which act on the ZFS dataset *including* its snapshots. By making automatic snapshots you can overrun the user's quota (i.e. if the snapshots reference files which were deleted afterwards) while the user's active dataset is not overflowing his quota. Recent ZFS (actually zpool v9 as in builds of OpenSolaris Nevada snv_77 and Solaris 10 Update 6 at least) include "refquota" and "refreservation" properties which act on *referenced* usage of the active dataset, not including its clones and snapshots. Probably you'd want a big "quota" on pool/export/home and not inherit it to users' home datasets, and set a smaller "refquota" on each pool/export/home/username dataset. This way all of your homes together would still consume no more than predefined space, but each user would know that if he deletes a file, he does in fact back off from his personal "ref"quota overflowing. -- Best regards, Jim Klimov mailto:[email protected] _______________________________________________ SunRay-Users mailing list [email protected] http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users
