[lm-announce] IMPORTANT - Light Microscope File system

[Jonathan Buzzard]

** High Priority **


As a temporary workaround to deal with the issues where Windows users get errors of the form "The specified network name is no longer available" I have just to deployed  one of the old Zeus servers as a Samba server for the new system.

I recommend that all users restart their computers to clear any issues.

As a result of this change, we have no clustered capability for anyone accessing the system using the SMB protocol (Windows and Mac users). Users connecting with NFS (mainly Linux workstations) will remain on the clustered server system as this is functioning as expected.

You will also lose the ability to see if files have been migrated to tape from Windows Explorer via the presence of black clocks against the file icons.

We will continue further investigation to resolve the SMB issues on the clustered system for Windows clients and aim to switch back once it is resolved. We are now able to reliably trigger the error message, and have confirmed that it only effects Windows clients, which should enable us to track down and resolve the problem eventually. We currently have do no know how long this might take.

We are also aware that write performance to the system is still not everything it could be. To address this however we need to make some changes to the storage system. Unfortunately IBM have withdrawn the firmware that the disk systems are currently running. Until a known good version is available we are reluctant to make any changes to the storage servers in case the LMF file system ends up toast. Our extreme displeasure has been communicated to IBM as this is the second serious firmware bug this year with the LMF storage systems

JAB.



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Jonathan A. Buzzard                      Tel: +441382-386998
Storage Administrator, College of Life Sciences
University of Dundee, DD1 5EH

The University of Dundee is a registered Scottish charity, No: SC015096