WinSCP does not work against OES 2 NSS volumes.

  • 7006183
  • 02-Jun-2010
  • 27-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 (OES 2) Linux Support Pack 2
SFTP protocol
WinSCP

Situation

A customer found a problem when renaming files on a remote NSS volume using WinSCP.  Files could be copied to or renamed on the remote system when NSS was not being used but not on the filesystem using NSS.  Accessing the files directly via the shell or other clients also allowed the rename operation to work properly.

Resolution

WinSCP uses the SFTP by default even though its name implies SCP is used.  SFTP is implemented as a subsystem of SSH and it renames regular files by creating hardlinks to them with the new name.  NSS volumes do not, by default, allow hardlinks which leads to the error during a rename operation.

To enable hardlinks execute the following commands within nsscon:

/ZLSSUpgradeCurrentVolumeMediaFormat=<VOLUME NAME>
/Hardlinks=<VOLUME NAME>