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Load netgroups into SVMs

Contributors

One of the methods you can use to match clients in export policy rules is by using hosts listed in netgroups. You can load netgroups from a uniform resource identifier (URI) into SVMs as an alternative to using netgroups stored in external name servers (vserver services name-service netgroup load).

What you'll need

Netgroup files must meet the following requirements before being loaded into an SVM:

  • The file must use the same proper netgroup text file format that is used to populate NIS.

    ONTAP checks the netgroup text file format before loading it. If the file contains errors, it will not be loaded and a message is displayed indicating the corrections you have to perform in the file. After correcting the errors, you can reload the netgroup file into the specified SVM.

  • Any alphabetic characters in host names in the netgroup file should be lowercase.

  • The maximum supported file size is 5 MB.

  • The maximum supported level for nesting netgroups is 1000.

  • Only primary DNS host names can be used when defining host names in the netgroup file.

    To avoid export access issues, host names should not be defined using DNS CNAME or round robin records.

  • The user and domain portions of triples in the netgroup file should be kept empty because ONTAP does not support them.

    Only the host/IP part is supported.

About this task

ONTAP supports netgroup-by-host searches for the local netgroup file. After you load the netgroup file, ONTAP automatically creates a netgroup.byhost map to enable netgroup-by-host searches. This can significantly speed up local netgroup searches when processing export policy rules to evaluate client access.

Step
  1. Load netgroups into SVMs from a URI:

    vserver services name-service netgroup load -vserver vserver_name -source {ftp|http|ftps|https}://uri

    Loading the netgroup file and building the netgroup.byhost map can take several minutes.

    If you want to update the netgroups, you can edit the file and load the updated netgroup file into the SVM.

Example

The following command loads netgroup definitions into the SVM named vs1 from the HTTP URL http://intranet/downloads/corp-netgroup:

vs1::> vserver services name-service netgroup load -vserver vs1
-source http://intranet/downloads/corp-netgroup