NSS provides the following enhancements and changes in OES 2018 SP2:
The traditional storage provisioning (thick provisioning) is a type of storage allocation in which the blocks of data on a disk is allocated in advance. With thick provisioning, the large pools of storage capacity are allocated to individual services but remain unused. In thin provisioning, the blocks of data are allocated on-demand; that is, the storage is provisioned but not consumed until the data is written. When you delete the data on thin-provisioned storage, the free space is released to the storage system. This type of storage allocation helps to optimize the utilization of the available storage.
Beginning with OES 2018 SP2, OES supports thin provisioning on a storage device, which allows you to discard (or trim) blocks that are not in use by the pool. The fstrim command allows you to trim the unused blocks in the NSS pool. fstrim is supported only on thin-provisioned SCSI devices with VMware ESXi on a linear target. For more information, see Section 10.2, NSS Management Utility (NSSMU) Quick Reference and Section 16.7, Managing Fstrim on a Pool.
Also, added a new option Blk_discard_on_delete on in the nlvm.conf file to discard the blocks on a thin-provisioned storage disk when you delete a pool on that disk. For more information, see Configuring Settings for the NLVM Library in the OES 2018 SP2: NLVM Reference.
A new media format named AES has been introduced beginning with OES 2018 SP2 to support the AES-256 encryption algorithm while creating NSS encrypted volumes. For more information on AES media and AES-256 encryption, see Section 5.3.3, AES Media and Section 20.0, Managing Encrypted NSS Volumes.
Added the following options or commands in NURM:
To notify the users whether the user maps created are old, and suggest a refresh on that user map.
To view the modified user maps based on the scheduled refresh time. Also, you can hover the cursor over the user map name to view the users added or removed from that user map.
map-users utility (Enhanced): Commands are added to enable and set the time for scheduled refresh of usermaps.
For more information, see NURM (OES User Rights Map) in the OES 2018 SP2: NSS AD Administration Guide.
NFARM for Windows and Mac provides the following enhancements and changes in OES 2018 SP2:
NFARM for Windows: Beginning with OES 2018 SP2, NFARM for Windows allows the eDirectory administrators or users with sufficient rights to manage the following:
Trustee rights, inherited rights filter, and view effective rights.
Owners, NSS attributes, and director quota
User quota
All paths that a user is a trustee of
Also, added an option in the Trustee Rights tab to list both eDirectory and Active Directory trustees in the trustee list. This allows the mapped eDirectory or AD administrators or users to manage the trustees and their explicit rights of both eDirectory and AD users.
NFARM for Mac: Before OES 2018 SP2, NFARM for Mac supported only salvage and purge operation on both eDirectory and Active Directory users. Beginning with OES 2018 SP2, NFARM for Mac allows the AD administrators or users with sufficient rights to manage the following:
Trustee rights, inherited rights filter, and view effective rights.
Director quota
User quota
For more information, see NFARM (OES File Access Rights Management) in the OES 2018 SP2: NSS AD Administration Guide.
Beginning with OES 2018 SP2, NSS AD servers can integrate with the DSfW domain in the same eDirectory tree where DSfW server acts as an authentication backend. The integration is certified in a single domain and trusted domain scenarios.
The following NSS utilities are enhanced to be made aware of the DST volumes.
rights
attrib
nssquota
For more information, see man page of the corresponding utility.