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  • #2300696

    Just a couple of Gotchas….

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    by dean.ethier ·

    Just a couple of comments.

    Careful with compression. Depending on the size of your server, you may not see a large hit with compression when you average users are accessing data during the day. I have multiple servers on my site with 500GB or more of user data on them. These are not databases either. Just plain file servers. Were you will see a hit to performance is when your backups, scheduled virus scans, etc take place. You do backup and scan for viruses, right? It’s not uncommon to see utilization jump from 25% or less during the day to 80-100% at night while these backend tasks take place. On a large server, turning on compression could make the differenc on being able to complete these tasks during a reasonable window whenusers are not accessing the data.

    The second Gotcha is with long file names. This one is more subtle, but much more serious. Yes you can create path names of up to 255 char. Actually I think its more like 254 char. The problem is this limit is from the root of a given drive. Create a path of 254 char. Now create a share at the end of this path. Map a drive to that share, and you can now crate an addition 254 char of path that the OS can now not deal with. Many applications (backup, antivirus, etc) cannot deal with this path that is now effectivly greater than 254 char from the root of the drive. Even most of the commands and apps supplied by Microsoft with the OS (copy, xcopy, scopy, chkdsk, explorer, etc) cannot deal with thispath. The bottom line is you may have data that is potentially at risk. There is no feasible and reliable way of preventing this from happening, and no feasible and reliable way of detecting where these long paths exist. Trust me, I have cases open with Microsoft on this. They are aware of this problem and so far they do not have any good answers.

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