Sun S7000 Feature Request Thread

Hi all,

I know there are now quite a few of us on here with Sun's S7000 storage kit. It's already a very feature-rich product and the firmware is improving all the time, but I know there are a few features some of us would really like to see, particularly in educational use.

Rather than just raising the odd request with Sun or your reseller, I thought it would be a good idea if we could collaborate on here and I'll ask Phil Lawrence if he wouldn't mind taking a look at this thread now and then and seeing if one of the Sun developers could look into the features we want.

As such, if there's a feature you would like to see in the S7000, could you make a post in this thread describing it and I'll update this post with a list? If a feature you want is already listed then say so and I'll make a note that more people want it. A feature could also be something you see as a 'flaw' in the way the S7000 works, but please remember to submit a proper case to Sun if it's an actual bug or issue.

Please click the subjects below and they should take you to the relevant post where the issue is explained.


Feature Request

• User quotas in the style of Microsoft File Server Resource Manager (1)

Bugs/Flaws

• Updating a root directory ACL does not affect permissions of files that already exist in a share (1)

Cheers,
Chris

User quotas in the style of Microsoft File Server Resource Manager

Particularly in education, I think many of us are using the S7000 to store our staff and student's userspaces and roaming profiles. Coming from a Windows Server background, many people were using File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) to apply quotas to userspaces to ensure that one or two people weren't able to fill up the whole server's disk space. Ideally this is something we really need on the S7000 to ensure the same thing doesn't happen to our SAN.

There are obviously a lot of different ways to set up userspaces on a network, but most people have something along the lines of a folder or share for each year group, and within that are folders or shares with student's usernames which are then mapped through Active Directory to the user account. Using FSRM, we can set a quota on the folder of the year group that will be applied to all the top-level subfolders (e.g. the username folders). This means we can set a 500MB quota for all Year 7 users, and students (or anyone else) won't be able to exceed 500MB of files in their userspace folder.

I know Sun have recently implemented a better quota system in Q3, and while I haven't upgraded yet I'm led to believe that this is based on the user rather than the location. In other words, User A can create 500MB of files anywhere, but no more. For us this isn't much help as there is a 'shared resources' location that users can write to which does not have any quota except a global quota for the whole share to control its growth. What we really need is a quota system that is based on the location and is not tied to any user account so that no one can exceed the quota on that folder.

Extra features that FSRM does like reporting and email alerts would be really good if possible. You can see the MS docs for FSRM here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...8WS.10%29.aspx

Hope that explains things, I will clarify or add screenshots if required.

Updating a root directory ACL does not affect permissions of files that already exist in a share

Not sure if this one is just me as no one else has reported it, but if you modify the root directory ACL on a CIFS share that already has files/folders in it then it doesn't seem to update the permissions of those files/folders, even if inheritance is set for that user/group.

If you select a folder within Windows and change the ACL on it then the default behaviour is for any changes you make to be inherited down the directory tree. Similarly with Linux, you can do chown -R to recursively update permissions on a directory tree.

Unless it's just me having this problem (in which case I will remove this bug and file a case with Sun), I think this behaviour is incorrect as it defeats the purpose of being able to modify an ACL on the S7000 once the share is in use as it won't actually affect any of your existing files. Some kind of tick box or inheritance option (or inheritance working properly for updates to the ACL) on the GUI for the root directory would be very useful for changing the root directory ACL once the share has been set up and has files in.

As I said, if this one is just me and I'm going about it wrong I'll remove this request.