topic schedule vscan disable on particular cifs in NetApp 7-mode systemshell crontab in ONTAP Discussions

schedule vscan disable on particular cifs in NetApp 7-mode systemshell crontab

duggulaxmi — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 13:37:50 GMT

Hello team,

Is it okay to schedule anything in systemshell crontab in NetApp ( 7 Mode :8.2.4P6)

I want to disable scan on a paritcular share at a fixed time daily

cifs shares change xyz -novscan (to be done at 16:00)

cifs shares change xyz -vscan (to be done at 16:30)

https://kb.netapp.com/app/answers/answer_view/a_id/1033705

Thanks in advance!

Re: Access systemshell in 7 mode

duggulaxmi — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 11:16:55 GMT

I got the answer: in KB :

https://kb.netapp.com/app/answers/answer_view/a_id/1033705

To enable the diag user in 7-Mode:

By default, the diag user is locked, and does not have a password.

View the current state of the diag user in 7-Mode by running the following command:

nqa-f3050-5> priv set advanced nqa-f3050-5*> useradmin diaguser show Name: diag Info: Account for access to systemshell Locked: yes

Perform the following steps to enable the diag user in 7-Mode:

nqa-f3050-5*> useradmin diaguser unlock

nqa-f3050-5*> useradmin diaguser show Name: diag Info: Account for access to systemshell Locked: no

Provide a password to the diag user:
nqa-f3050-5*> useradmin diaguser password The password must be at least 8 characters long. Please enter a new password: Please enter it again:
Now you can access the OS using the diag user account:
nqa-f3050-5> priv set advanced nqa-f3050-5*> systemshell Data ONTAP/i386 (nqa-f3050-5) (ttyp0) login: diag Password: %pwd /var/home/diag
Run the exit command to return to the standard Data ONTAP 8 shell

Re: schedule vscan disable on particular cifs in NetApp 7-mode systemshell crontab

GidonMarcus — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 07:51:35 GMT

The shell is for NetApp engineering only. it's unsupported to do any operation under this shell without engineering approving or documenting it

From the article you linked to "is only to be used for diagnosing issues that are not resolvable using the filer shell.".

You should schedule this cron ob/sched job from a remote server to run the command via ssh, or via one of the other interfaces or SDK.

Gidi

Re: schedule vscan disable on particular cifs in NetApp 7-mode systemshell crontab

duggulaxmi — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 10:21:15 GMT

Okay. Thanks for the reply GidonMarcus

Can we use NetApp Workflow Automation for this.

My purpose is only to run a particular command at a fixed time..

Re: schedule vscan disable on particular cifs in NetApp 7-mode systemshell crontab

GidonMarcus — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 12:47:53 GMT

WFA don't have a scheduler. but you can trigger a wrokflow via restAPI call to WFA, so you still need external scheduler.

if it was a system i maintain. i would have set dedicated local user on the 7-mode with right only to run the command you need and schedule the command run externaly

another question, why do you want to disable VSCAN? if there's some workload you don't want to get scan you can create a dedicated share for it (also for the same volume/qtree) and set it to -novscan.

Re: schedule vscan disable on particular cifs in NetApp 7-mode systemshell crontab

duggulaxmi — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 13:29:34 GMT

So is it possible to create a user who can issue only that command, i will have a check on that

I can use normal windows task scheduler if that's the case

Thank you so much for your input.

The problem is because these we have a CIFS shares created on a volume of around 2.3TB which is used for Citrix home drive, and i see we have around 2000 users home drives sitting on it.

Even the user profiles are sitting on another CIFS share which is around 600GB

So Citrix users are complaining about slowness during the login

During login the IOPS happen on the user profile volume.

So we have vscan also enabled on CIFS shares which is ideally set to scan only for a write operations.

I wanted to see the performance by disabling it during the login time, so it will not cause multiple tasks in NetApp in the background.

In case if it helps and provide better performance will have to automate it.

But also I dont see performance issues in netapp as i check the CIFS latency during the same hours it is 2ms for read and 1 ms for write

I just wanted to lessen the load on NetApp by disabling the vscan

Thank you @GidonMarcus