Rebuilding NSS Storage Pools and Volumes
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Novell, Inc.
01 Jun 2002
To repair storage pools and logical volumes, Novell Storage Services (NSS) provides the VERIFY and REBUILD utilities. The VERIFY utility checks the file system integrity for an NSS pool by searching for inconsistent data blocks or other errors. This utility checks to see if there are problems with the file system.
The REBUILD utility verifies and uses the existing leaves of an object tree to rebuild all the other trees in the system. You need to deactivate pools (and all the volumes in the pools) before you run REBUILD so users cannot access the volumes you are rebuilding. When you deactivate a storage pool, all the volumes in the pool will automatically deactivate.
REBUILD also copies errors and transactions into an error file called volume_name.rlf at the root of the DOS drive on your server. Every time you rebuild a particular NSS volume, the previous error file is overwritten. If you want to keep old error files, move them to another location. You can check the error file whenever an NSS volume does not come up in active mode after a rebuild.
REBUILD is not equivalent to VREPAIR. You should use REBUILD only as a last resort to recover the file system. If you use the REBUILD utility to recover from data corruption, you will likely lose some data in the process.
When you use the REBUILD and VERIFY utilities, these utilities both generate a log file at the root of the DOS drive. To run REBUILD, enter the following command at the server console prompt:
nss/poolrebuild=<poolname>
This verifies and accounts for all blocks in the system. If the volume has errors, the errors appear on the screen. The NSS volume remains in maintenance mode; otherwise, it reverts to the active state. You then need to mount the volume again.
You can also verify a pool by entering: nss /verify <Enter> at the server console prompt. This brings up a list of pool names, and you can then select the pool. The VERIFY utility is a read-only assessment of the pool.
* Originally published in Novell AppNotes
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