Copy/Move Files preserving all metadata

Question

Hi,
Silly question, but how do I copy or move files on an OES11 sp1 NSS volume (source and destination are on the same server) in such a way that all the metadata and data structure is preserved? In particular I want to preserve ownership, trustee's, timestamps, and namespaces. Thus I cannot use for example a Windows client since it does not understand the Mac namespace among other things. If the data were on NetWare NSS volumes (as both source and destination) then I would use SCMT. But of course SCMT does not work with OES11. I tried using the Miggui tool, but it does not work either - it does not support the source and destination being on the same server.
My use case is that I want to move a user's homedirectory to a new volume (on either the same or a different server) and then create a junction from the original location to the new thus eliminating the two hassles of updating the user object homedirectory attribute in eDir and/or revising the shortcut/alias on their desktop (typically an OSX client).
Thanks,
Ron

Answer 1

All accounts I am testing with are LUMified and 'id' on the server is copacetic too, so that is not it. I thought that maybe it was some "bad info" in one of the miggui xml project files so I blew them all away (/var/opt/novell/migration/). Tried with the bad account - and it still failed. So I looked at the log file and found this bug reported there:
2013-09-27 12:28:37,718 ERROR - FILESYSTEM:volmount.rb:Command to mount source: ruby /opt/novell/migration/sbin/volmount.rb -s 0.1.2.3 -a "cn=badaccount,ou=x,o=y" -c Not Applicable -f "/var/opt/novell/migration/NewProj0/fs/mnt/source" -m -t OES20
2013-09-27 12:28:37,722 INFO - FILESYSTEM:volmount.rb:*****************Command output start**********************************
2013-09-27 12:28:37,722 INFO - FILESYSTEM:volmount.rb:Information: ldapsearch command executed as "ldapsearch -LLL -s sub -H ldaps://0.1.2.3 -x -D "cn=badaccount,ou=x,o=y" "(&(CN=n12_*)(objectClass=Volume))" linuxNCPMountPoint -W"
2013-09-27 12:28:37,722 INFO - FILESYSTEM:volmount.rb:/opt/novell/migration/sbin/volmount.rb:616: [BUG] Segmentation fault
2013-09-27 12:28:37,722 INFO - FILESYSTEM:volmount.rb:ruby 1.8.7 (2011-12-28 patchlevel 357) [x86_64-linux]
Clearly the attempt to mount the volumes as sources is causing a segmentation fault - says so right there! But it has no problem with the exact same volumes as targets. Likely this is because the target is the local server and nothing special needs to be done to mount the target file systems since they are arleady mounted. But the source could be anything so it is going to try to identify and mount the source filesystems via that volmount.rb script.
I decided to try the offending command from the command-line to see if I could get better feedback on the error and to quickly/easily try different parameters. Right away I could see that the miggui was either not passing the password on the command-line or it was but was hiding it in the log file. Also it passes an incorrect type with the '-t OES20' parameter. It should be '-t OES2'. However looking at the volmount.rb script it turns out that it only tests for 'NW' / not 'NW'. Thus if you pass it '-t popo' it will still work just fine!
The long story made short is that I have no idea what is causing this bug. At one point I thought that it was an error in handling certain characters in the password, such as &. But that turned out to be a red herring. After a lot of password testing, eDir object rights futzing and filesystem trustee assignment poking I've come up with... "it is working now - no idea what was wrong earlier". Sigh I hate these kind of problems.
Cheers,
Ron