The SoCS File server is the main data repository for the School of Computer Science. It holds user home folders, group data, is used to server data for services that require large data pools (nextcloud, moodle, gitlab, etc) and holds backups from the Proxmox environment. It is an Oracle X7-2XL server with 52TB of usable data storage running Oracle Solaris.

The SoCS primary file server is located at gringotts.socs.uoguelph.ca.

The server contains 12 disks. These are configured into a raid 10 zpool - 6 mirrors of two disks each. The configuration can be viewed with the “zpool status” command. These disks are mounted to /export. In general each discrete use case is it's own zfs filesystem. For example each home folder, or each folder backing a web service. This allows zfs attributes to be applied independently to each filesystem.

Folders that require access from other machines are shared using the “share nfs” attribute in the zfs configuration for each zfs filesystem. share.sec.krb5.rw is allowed from any SoCS IP while share.sec.sys.krb5 is only allowed for the trusted 192.168.100.0/24 back of rack network as sys authentication does not require the user's password for access unlike kerberos.

Samba sharing is enabled using the samba4 package, and configured in the /etc/samba folder. Samba is now used only for mounting SoCS home folders on Windows or Mac clients.

Snapshots are taking using the standard “zfs snapshot” command. This is done via a cronjob run by the root user to allow hourly, daily, weekly and monthly jobs. A second cronjob runs the /var/backups/clean_snapshots.sh script which will remove old snapshots. These snapshots use zfs copy on write filesystem feature and so are instant and take up no additional disk space.

Backups are currently manually run using rsync to send data to the SoCS backup file server, Dursley.