Immutability and appendOnly for AFM-DR filesets

By enabling an integrated archive manager (IAM) mode on an Active File Management Disaster Recovery (AFM-DR) primary and secondary fileset, you can set the Immutability and appendOnly flags on a file or a directory in an AFM-DR fileset.

You cannot change or rename an immutable file. On a file or directory with the appendOnly flag enabled, you can do append operations, but you cannot do delete, modify, or rename operations.

After you set these flags on a file or a directory in an AFM-DR primary fileset, AFM automatically synchronizes these metadata flags on the secondary fileset. You can set the Immutability and appendOnly flags independently. If both Immutability and appendOnly flags are set on a file, the Immutability flag takes effect.

To enable the Immutability and appendOnly flags, you need to enable an IAM mode on an AFM-DR primary and secondary fileset. All IAM modes are supported. The behavior of the Immutability and appendOnly flags is the same for a GPFS file and a GPFS directory. To configure an IAM mode, see Enabling integrated archive manager (IAM) modes on AFM-DR filesets.

For more information about these flags, see Immutability and appendOnly features.

Note: You must do the following upgrade for the Immutability and appendOnly flags:
  • Upgrade all nodes in a cluster to the latest release level.
  • Upgrade the file system version to the latest version.
  • Upgrade the cluster minRelease version to the latest version.

If an AFM-DR primary fileset and an AFM-DR secondary fileset has a linked dependent fileset, ensure that the same IAM mode, which is set on the primary fileset and the secondary fileset, is set on all linked dependent filesets.

If an AFM-DR primary and an AFM-DR secondary fileset has one or more linked dependent filesets and you want to set the compliant mode, do the following steps:
  1. Set the compliant IAM mode on the primary fileset and all linked dependent filesets.
  2. Set the compliant IAM mode on the secondary fileset and all linked dependent filesets.
Note: To enable IAM mode on a dependent fileset, you need not to run the mmafmctl stop command or the mmafmctl start command. These commands are needed only to set an IAM mode on an AFM-DR primary fileset.