LTFS-LE: How to Limit LTFS Volumes to a Specific User or Group (Doc ID 2168697.1)

Last updated on MARCH 17, 2025

Applies to:

Goal

Best Practices would be to limit volumes to specific users or groups within SAMBA.  

This will avoid allowing multiple users to perform write operations to a single mounted tape volume/device (folder or file system), where the files from each of those users would end up being interleaved on the tape.  And those sames files, written from different users, are most likely not related.  Then when a group of files created by a particular user needs to be retrieved, the tape drive will be required to perform many seek operations thus degrading performance. Likewise, if the write operations from multiple users is queued simultaneously by the operating system (OS), then fragments of several files may be interleaved. When a tape written in this fashion is read, the tape drive must perform multiple seek operations in order to retrieve even a single file,. Although the POSIX interface and LTFS Open allow this, it is strongly discouraged, as tapes written in this fashion will experience extremely poor performance during read operations. This is an aspect of LTFS Open and tape in general.

The most efficient way to use LTFSLE is to configure clients so that one user/job is limited to exclusive access to one tape volume in one tape drive at a time.

Solution

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