Background on VOLMNCHK.DAT and VOLMNCH2.DAT

  • 3959573
  • 27-Nov-2006
  • 27-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell NetWare 6.5
Novell Open Enterprise Server (NetWare kernel)

Situation

During a backup, it was observed that SYS:\ETC\VOLMN\VOLMNCHK.DAT and SYS:\ETC\VOLMN\VOLMNCHK.DAT are not backed up as they are in use. This document will explain the purpose and importance of these two files.

Resolution

With the release of NetWare 6.5, a number of new features were added to NSS, two of them are volume move and volume split operations. Both operations are discussed in the NSS portion of the documentation. As an quick overview, these operations are a part of Distributed File System (DFS) which allow directories to be moved to different volumes while still referenced by traversing the directory structure of the original volume. These two files maintain the status when data is moved from one point to another. If the server or volume becomes unavailable before the operation completes, these files will help the operation complete when the resources are available.