It would seem that User3 is running a bit short of disk-space. I say 'a bit' since we haven't hit any walls yet. We have 15% free right now, which is good for a while. But how far back Salvage works is starting to take a dive as a result, since NSS enforces the 10% free-blocks rule.
One prime side-effect of declining Salvage availability will be an increase in restore-from-tape requests. Frankly, that's a pain in the tape-library, and I don't like having to go there. Neither do either of my office-mates. So we're looking into more space.
We do need a policy for defining when we add space to a volume. We've had this SAN for 1.5 years now, and this is the first time we've come close to knocking our heads on a space limit. Pretty good by my measure. One of us is looking into prime space-users and will be putting pressure on a couple of them. That might free up some gigs.
So this is as good a time as any for describing some of the built in ways to gather disk-usage information out of Netware! My prime source these days is the netware portal.
https://ourserver.admcs.wwu.edu:8009/
That thing. It came in NW5.1 IIRC, possibly NW5.0, so its been around a good long while. Very useful, and a lot of Netware admins are woefully unaware of the wonders it has in store. I aim to fix that.
Go there.
The very first page (after logging in, of course) is the page with the Volumes on it. Click on a volume, preferably one with user-data on it.
Now take a look at that list. In all versions, you should see a list of the root-level directories. Depending on your volume type and netware version, what other data you see can change a bit.
NW5.1: Traditional Volumes have a "size" column that gives the size of that directory tree. Very useful for things like tracking user-directory size. NSS volumes do not have the same advantage, so the Size column for directories is zero.
NW6.0: Works as NW5.1, but newer NSS code-bases may populate the Size field.
NW6.5: Fixes the NSS-has-no-size bug, so it populates! Nice feature, I'm sure Novell caught a lot of flak about not getting it in there before.
Why the difference, you ask? That's because traditional volumes cache the entire FAT table in memory, which makes that sort of on-the-fly calculation possible and fast. It also was the reason traditional volumes too a l-o-n-g time to mount (one volume at my old job took 15 minutes to mount). I'm not sure what changes to allow Novell to do this sort of thing in NSS. Perhaps the built this very space-tracking feature into the system. I'm not sure.
For NW6.0 and NW6.5, there is another feature that you may not be aware of. Go back to that Directory listing, and look at the top row of icons. There is an icon there called "Inventory". If you click on that button, a java-thingy kicks off and inventories the volume. What you get in the end is a report detailing a wide variety of things:
Two things, quite useful. Enjoy!
One prime side-effect of declining Salvage availability will be an increase in restore-from-tape requests. Frankly, that's a pain in the tape-library, and I don't like having to go there. Neither do either of my office-mates. So we're looking into more space.
We do need a policy for defining when we add space to a volume. We've had this SAN for 1.5 years now, and this is the first time we've come close to knocking our heads on a space limit. Pretty good by my measure. One of us is looking into prime space-users and will be putting pressure on a couple of them. That might free up some gigs.
So this is as good a time as any for describing some of the built in ways to gather disk-usage information out of Netware! My prime source these days is the netware portal.
https://ourserver.admcs.wwu.edu:8009/
That thing. It came in NW5.1 IIRC, possibly NW5.0, so its been around a good long while. Very useful, and a lot of Netware admins are woefully unaware of the wonders it has in store. I aim to fix that.
Go there.
The very first page (after logging in, of course) is the page with the Volumes on it. Click on a volume, preferably one with user-data on it.
Now take a look at that list. In all versions, you should see a list of the root-level directories. Depending on your volume type and netware version, what other data you see can change a bit.
NW5.1: Traditional Volumes have a "size" column that gives the size of that directory tree. Very useful for things like tracking user-directory size. NSS volumes do not have the same advantage, so the Size column for directories is zero.
NW6.0: Works as NW5.1, but newer NSS code-bases may populate the Size field.
NW6.5: Fixes the NSS-has-no-size bug, so it populates! Nice feature, I'm sure Novell caught a lot of flak about not getting it in there before.
Why the difference, you ask? That's because traditional volumes cache the entire FAT table in memory, which makes that sort of on-the-fly calculation possible and fast. It also was the reason traditional volumes too a l-o-n-g time to mount (one volume at my old job took 15 minutes to mount). I'm not sure what changes to allow Novell to do this sort of thing in NSS. Perhaps the built this very space-tracking feature into the system. I'm not sure.
For NW6.0 and NW6.5, there is another feature that you may not be aware of. Go back to that Directory listing, and look at the top row of icons. There is an icon there called "Inventory". If you click on that button, a java-thingy kicks off and inventories the volume. What you get in the end is a report detailing a wide variety of things:
- A list of file-extentions, sorted by how much space they take up on the volume. Good for seeing how bad the MP3 collections are getting.
- A list of file-extensions, sorted by how many files they have on the volume.
- A list of users, sorted by how much space each user is using on the volume, as tracked by Owner attributes. Note: some backup and AV packages can 'steal' the owner-attribute from users, so this may not be reliable for tracking the true owners of files.
- A break-down of the last-accessed time, for last-day, last-week, two weeks ago, a month ago, two months ago, four months ago, six months ago, a year ago, and more than two years ago.
- A break-down of the creation-time for files, same as above
- A break-down of the last-modified time for files, same as above
Two things, quite useful. Enjoy!
I've used the inventory feature for awhile, but I never noticed the size reporting you mention. That's because most of my servers are pre 6.5 NSS volumes. I just looked on my 6.5 servers, and it still doesn't work. On my 6.0 servers the column shows "Not Supported". On my 6.5 servers it shows "N/A". How do you get an actual size listed?
This might be because we have directory-quotas turned on for our user-directory volumes. As I check some other volumes we don't check often (such as the PUBLIC volume in the cluster) I see the N/A you mention.