Recommended best practices and considerations for managing long filenames on OneFS include:
- In OneFS 9.3 and later, long filename support accommodates names up to a maximum of 1,024 bytes and 255 characters.
- After an upgrade to OneFS 9.3 or later, the long filename feature is not activated or enabled by default. The cluster administrator has to opt in by creating a name length configuration.
- Enable long filename support only if you are actually planning to use names that exceed the OneFS defaults of 255 bytes and 255 characters.
- Once long filename capabilities have been enabled by creating a name length configuration, the long filename feature cannot be disabled. OneFS does not track if or when a long filename or path is created.
- If the maximum name length configuration is reduced after long-named files have been created, those existing files with long names can still be read and written. However, new long-named files cannot be created.
- Symbolic links (symlinks) created over the SMB protocol are limited to1,024 bytes due to the size limit on the size of extended attributes in OneFS.
- Any pathnames specified in long filename platform API (pAPI) operations are limited to 4,068 bytes.
- All SyncIQ target clusters described in existing SyncIQ policies must be running OneFS 9.3 or later and have long filename support configured to match the source cluster. Failure to install and commit the OneFS 9.3 or later release and/or to enable the long filename support feature on all SyncIQ target clusters can result in the failure of SyncIQ policies.
- SyncIQ policies fail when a connection is made to a cluster without Long Filename Support.
- With SyncIQ cascaded replication configurations, the checks that OneFS uses to verify and fail an incompatible SyncIQ job cannot identify and terminate a configuration where the first-level target is running OneFS 9.3 with long filename support enabled, but the cascaded target is running an earlier OneFS version and/or does not have long filenames configured. In these cases, SyncIQ fails without warning on the cascaded cluster.
- Restoring data from a OneFS 9.3 or later NDMP backup containing long filenames to a cluster running an earlier OneFS version fails with an ‘ENAMETOOLONG’ error for each long-named file. However, all the files with regular-length names are successfully restored from the backup stream.
- OneFS ICAP anti-virus does not support long filenames. However, OneFS CAVA (ICAP’s replacement) is compatible with long names.
- The OneFS isi_vol_copy migration utility does not support long filenames.
- OneFS WebDAV protocol implementation does not support long filenames.