Past week I was trying to delete some old unwanted files out of my NetApp system’s root volume and I wasn’t having a Unix system at my side. I tell you it was really a bad experience because a few systems were not having CIFS licenses installed, although I was able to browse them through my laptop and delete the files also; but *only* files no directories and there were thousands of files scattered under hundreds of directories which have been lying as root backup from the day we have done ontap upgrade.
I literally gave up, but then I realized that when these systems had shipped they were having CIFS demo licenses installed and if I can do anything to make the cifs working again with those expired licenses it would be great. So I started doing experiments with them and soon I saw removing those licenses and re-adding them validated them and my systems were having 3 months cifs license. Voila got a way to use the expired licenses.
So here’s what I have done
n cifs terminate
n license delete cifs
n license add
n cifs restart
That’s all and I have cifs on my filers for another 3 months but I don’t think one would be interested using any service in this way especially when he got to support production or dev environment. But yes it’s very handy if a day you want to use one of them for some test or small activity.
