Reverse Path Lookup (RPL)

All file systems have the Reverse Path Lookup (RPL) feature enabled. Any file system that did not have RPL enabled prior to upgrading will have it enabled as part of the metadata conversion process which runs the first time StorNext 5 is used. StorNext uses RPL in the following ways:

Replication uses RPL when generating reports.

• Storage Manager uses RPL as a way to quickly generate full path names.
• The Directory Quotas feature requires RPL.
• The command cvadmin repof uses RPL to display the full pathname of open files.
• Some StorNext log messages use RPL to display full path names.

In previous releases, enabling RPL on file systems created with pre-4.0 versions of StorNext could have negative side effects:

• Extensive downtime to populate existing inodes with RPL information.
• Increased metadata space usage.
• Decreased performance for certain inode-related operations.

However, the metadata conversion process allows RPL to always be stored efficiently and these negative side effects do not apply.