ARX: What is this proxy user anyway?

Hello everyone! Glad to be back. I got married 2 weeks ago and had a great honeymoon, not thinking about work at all. Of course as soon as I get back I am wooshed away back to the grind.

I am currently in South Carolina and performing an ARX install at a customer who is in desperate need of help with managing their files. They have a windows 2003 server that is almost full. Less than 1% space free. They are desperate to migrate data off to reconfigure their Windows Server 2003, which has a 5TB LUN. They are finding it hard to manage such a large file system, not to mention they need to move data off and use this as Tier 1. They are planning to use the ARX to migrate the data off to temporary storage, break the 5TB LUN into smaller LUN’s to make it more manageable then move data back on to those LUNs that is tier 1 data.

Of course what drove them to look for a solution like ours was simple and I think most IT professionals will feel this pain, their users won’t archive their data. It just keeps piling up. My thought is, with a great solution why ask the users to archive when you have a tool like the ARX that can help solve this problem without asking your users to get rid of their data. ( I am not advocating users keep ALL their data )

So far the installation is going well. Of course there is always something that pops up no matter how much planning you do. This one is simple. They are not sure if all the objects in the two file systems have one account that can access them. See the ARX needs an account, what we call a proxy user, to work with the file systems. This user will be used to-do a tree-walk to populate our metadata ( the database the ARX keeps of the files on the file system), it can be used to perform migrations and tiering. Whenever a file is moved by the ARX it is done with this user.

The way to solve this, and windows admins will cringe, would be to-do a massive recursive permissions replacement, or create a script. If anyone has a better idea let me know! Hopefully we do not have to-do this. It is not often I come to a customer who doesn’t have at least one account or group that has access to all objects. I can understand why they did this to segment access of their data.

The weather is beautiful down here. Not too hot and very sunny. I can’t complain about the travel I do.

Until next time.

-Michael