Convert volume to UTF-8?

HendersonD · ‎2011-07-13

I have three volumes I need to convert to UTF-8. All three volumes are CIFS shares. The command appears to be:

vol lang <volname> en_US.UTF-8

I made a test volume without UTF-8 and then used the above command to convert to UTF-8. When I did this I received two messages:

"This will change the NFS-visible file names for shared files. The may confuse some UNIX systems, since they cache directory entries with the old mappings. Some files may no longer be accessible by NFS. The change might also affect snapmirror and snapvault resulting in data corruption. You might have to re-baseline these relationships. Do you still want to perform this change?"

Since these CIFS shares are only use by Windows and Macs boxes and not straight UNIX machines, it seems I am safe. We do use SnapMirror so I have some concern. The next warning was scary:

"WAFL_check -f will detect NFS files that will no longer be accessible via NFS. Should the system be halted following this change so WAFL_check can be run?"

My inclination is to say no since again we do not use UNIX boxes to access these shares. Two questions:

1. Are there any gotchas in converting to UTF-8 in my situation?

2. If I do say yes to the second question does it halt the filer as it runs through all the files in the volume doing the WAFL_check?

andrc · ‎2011-07-13

It appears the answer to question 1 is in the output you received; you don't have to worry about the impact on NFS clients if there are no NFS clients, but the possibility of corruption does exist if you use SnapMirror. How much pain would it cause you to reinitialise the SnapMirror relationships for the affected volumes? Depending on your reasons for using UTF-8 there's also the option of creating a new UTF-8 volume and migrating any required data across to it, of course you'd have to create a new SnapMirror relationship for any new volumes.

For question 2 the filer would be halted as WAFL_check cannot be run while the filer is up and serving data, it's normally run manually from the Special Boot Menu.