Migration of the central file storage

The Center for Information and Media Technologies at the University of Paderborn has been operating a central file server for the entire university for years, serving also the home and permanent group directories (PC2DATA) of the PC2 users. With the commissioning of the second computer center in 2021, the prerequisites for a redundant operation of the file server are given. In order to expand the storage space and increase performance, the PC2 has purchased a second almost identical file server and put it into operation in the second computer center. The systems are designed in such a way that they can replace each other in the event of a fault.

In the future, the data of the PC2 users will be made available on the system procured by the PC2. A migration of the data is necessary for this. The corresponding sync jobs are already running and mirroring the data from the old system to the new one on a daily basis. In the course of the migration, individual paths will also change. The relevant changes are shown in the following table.

Environment variable

Old path

New path

Environment variable

Old path

New path

$HOME

/upb/departments/pc2/users/<first letter>/<username>

/pc2/users/<first letter>/<username>

$PC2DATA

/upb/departments/pc2/groups/<projectname>

/pc2/groups/<projectname>

If you use the absolute paths in your scripts, you must remove "/upb/departments/" as a matter of principle. In principle, however, we recommend using the environment variables, since these are set centrally by us and you do not have to worry about paths yourself.