[gpfsug-discuss] GPFS best practises : end user standpoint

[Jonathan Buzzard]

On Wed, 2018-01-17 at 06:35 -0500, valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Jan 2018 17:25:47 +0000, Jonathan Buzzard said:
> > User comes with problem, you investigate find problem is due to
> > "wacky"
> > characters point them to the mandatory training documentation, tell
> > them they need to rename their files to something sane and take no
> > further action. Sure English is not their primary language but
> > *they*
> > have chosen to study in an English speaking country so best to
> > actually
> > embrace that.
> > I do get it, many of our users are not native English speakers as
> > well.
> > Yes it's a tough policy but on the other hand pandering to them
> > does
> > them no favours either.
> 
> Go ahead and try to make that policy stick in Tokyo or Cairo or
> Berlin or any other city or country where English isn't the primary
> language.

Sure hard, but not *my* problem :-) Though to be fair missing accent's
off is not that bad. Obviously if your language does not use the Roman
alphabet then things are somewhat more serious. Note I am in the UK and
you just don't use a £ in your file name (if your sensible) so I really
do get it.

> 
> Seriously - this is something that IBM has to make work well across
> all languages if they want to make this fly globally and not just in
> places that are English-predominant.

Oh GPFS works fine; well unless it is ancient versions of mmbackup in
which case they just cause your backup to be aborted without doing
anything! It's all the other end user programs that, especially end
user scripts that cause problems.

So either we advise users that special characters might cause them
problems and best to not use them in the first place, or wait till they
have a problem and then tell them they need to rename some thousands of
files.

In sort it's not IBM's problem other than they are one of the major
culprits who helped create this mess back in the day :-)

> Though to be honest, most of the problems I've had have been with
> embedded blanks in filenames, newline characters in filenames
> (fortunately only a half dozen or so out of almost 500M files), and
> esc-[-random from people banging on F8 instead of 8, etc.  Have the
> occasional backspace character creep in too.

The mind boggles how you manage to get a backspace character into a
file name. A new line is bad enough, but a backspace!!! To be honest
its more this sort of nonsense than none ASCII characters that cause
the problems.

JAB.

-- 
Jonathan A. Buzzard                         Tel: +44141-5483420
HPC System Administrator, ARCHIE-WeSt.
University of Strathclyde, John Anderson Building, Glasgow. G4 0NG