Currently, Novell® Storage Services™ (NSS) stores some file metadata in Open Enterprise Server for Linux that is not accessible with common UNIX functions. The Target Service Agent (TSA) for NSS on Linux uses a special message interface to access the additional metadata. However, with the XAttr Extension included in OES 2015, you can now read, back up, and restore this file metadata without converting existing Linux products.
Future NSS releases will remain backward compatible with this feature.
This section covers the following topics:
XAttr Extension presents extra metadata as an uninterpreted data blob to any backup applications. The same data blob can then be passed to setxattr to restore the metadata, while preserving all the backed-up time stamps for the file.
For sample test files that use this functionality, see the nw_metadata.c, libmetadata.c, and restore.c files that are included with this documentation.