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NFS Aliasing on Isilon
IHAC that is migrating off NetApp to Isilon however they will need to maintain the same export paths from a workflow prospective. They have too many legacy applications, scripts, etc that have dependencies on the legacy paths. Trying to change the applications, etc would be too painful and hard to do. With their NetApp they used the export alias feature. Does anyone have ideas on how to achieve the same thing?
The partner we are working with suggested manually creating symlinks on nodes and export it. Initial testing seems to show it works but would it be supported?
example:
1. Create a symlink on the node in question: /data -> /ifs/data
· isilon-1# cd /; ln -s /ifs/data
2. Export the symlink
· isilon-1# isi nfs exports create /data
3. Mount the symlink from a host
· ubuntu# mkdir /data; mount –t nfs Isilon-1:/data /data
Verify browse and read
Peter_Sero
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Posted September 18th, 2013 00:00
What's the point about the symlink?
ubuntu# mkdir /data; mount –t nfs Isilon-1:/ifs/whatever/else/might/be/in/the/way/data /data
will appear identically to the Ubuntu users when accessing files and dirs.
(mount and df will reveal the longer path on the server side, but that does not affect access.)
-- Peter
Peter_Sero
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Posted September 18th, 2013 10:00
That must obviously be the case, thanks!
sfallon wrote:
> They have too many legacy applications, scripts, etc that have dependencies on the legacy path
This I all understand -- all application level --, but not being able to modify the fstab (system level)
was slightly beyond my imagination, until this point in time ;-)
-- Peter
AndrewChung
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Posted September 18th, 2013 10:00
Peter,
The point is that they have clients which they cannot easily make a change to the mount table. So following your example, they have a mount like this in fstab:
OldServer:/root/path/to/nfs/export /data
They cannot/will not/or is prohibitively difficult to change it to say:
OldServer:/ifs/root/path/to/nfs/export /data
By using a symlink on the Isilon, they can just use a CNAME or other DNS trick to redirect clients from OldServer to Isilon-1. If you have thousands of clients, some that you may not have direct control over (different departments), you have issues to migrate over to an Isilon. Until Isilon gets NFS aliases (it's coming!) we have this issue.
cincystorage
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Posted September 18th, 2013 11:00
I know it's not what we're talking about here, but this also works for SMB access.
Peter_Sero
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Posted September 20th, 2013 06:00
Either way, the number of distinct exports that would use the same
linked path (such as isilon:/homes) is, err, limited...
-- Peter
AndrewChung
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Posted September 20th, 2013 09:00
It may work on SMB as well but I would not recommend using that at all. There should be no reason to use that since SMB allows you to arbitrarily map a name to any place in the file system namespace. NFSv3 does not allow you to do this in most implementations.
AndrewChung
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Posted September 20th, 2013 09:00
Peter,
Definitely limited. We need to wait until NFS gets pulled into the access zones. When that happens you may be able to remap the NFS exports on an individual access zone basis. This will be another step toward full multi-tenancy.
dan-pncbank
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Posted June 24th, 2019 08:00
i have a problem deleting or modifying nfs alias on Isilon. How can I get the root cause and fix for that issue?
AndrewChung
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Posted September 17th, 2013 13:00
Yes, this is supported. It's ugly, but this works to keep old export paths in most cases. I would suggest the customer start migrating away from the old paths to the new paths.