Recently one of my fellow NetApp admin friend asked me a very general question,
“How do you restrict your data to be copied through snapmirror?”
As like any other normal NetApp guy my answer was also same old vanilla type.
“Go to snapmirror.allow file and put the host name if your have set snapmirror.access to legacy or you can directly put hostname in host=host1,host2 format in snapmirror.access option.”
But he wanted more granular level of permission, so my another answer was,
“You can also use snapmirror.checkip.enable so any system reporting same hostname will not be able to access data.”
But even on that he wasn’t happy and was asking if there is any other way so he can restrict snapmirror access on volume basis. At this point I said “No, NetApp doesn’t provide this level of granular access.”
So the topic stopped there, but this question was there in my mind and always hunted me why there isn’t any such way.
Fast forward Past week when I had some extra time in my hand I started searching on net for this and fortunate enough I got a way on NOW site to get this work.
It was recorded under Bugs section with Bug ID # 80611 Which reads as.
“There is an unsupported undocumented feature of the /etc/snapmirror.allow file, such that if it is filled as follows:
hostA:vol1
hostA:vol29
hostB:/vol/vol0/q42
hostC
and "options snapmirror.access legacy" is issued, then the desired access policy will be implemented. Again note that this is unsupported and undocumented so use at your own risk.”
Yes, though NetApp says that there is a way to do that but they also say well sometimes it may break other functionality or may not work as expected.
Finding this I sent the details to my friend but unfortunately he don’t want to give it a try on his production systems and test systems are not available with him.
So if anyone of you want to try it or have tried it before please put your experience in comments field.
