View Thumbnails

This was/is a significant issue for us as well. In our case it's with DX for NAS because we are extending files located on a Celerra to a Centera. In either case, it's the client OS (both XP and Vista) that exhibit the thumbnail problem, so the workaround is the same regardless of DX-NAS or DX-Windows.

The OS won't display thumbnails for files that have the offline attribute set (O). The only way around the extended problem that we have been able to find is to tell DX not to set the offline attribute. This doesn't seem to impact extended operations at all that we have found - yet. It simply masks all indicators that the file has been extended. Users won't know, client OS won't know, admins will only know if they look at the properties and see the actual full file size with size on disk at 8kb.

For DX-NAS, the command to disable the offline attribute is:

fs_dhsm -modify -offline_attr off

Perhaps there is a similar setting in DX for Windows that could be modified. Ultimately it's the client OS's handling of the offline attribute that is the cause of the issue.

Hope this helps.
--Jeff

Jeff would this will help to get the icons in original format for exe files?

And another problem we have faced is we are not able to see the icons for htmal files?

I'll bet it would help with exe and html file icons also, although I have not proven this directly. It's a quick command that takes effect immediately for the entire file system, and just as easy to re-enable if needed.

In addition to the thumbnail viewing we had trouble with one application specifically, Autodesk 3ds Max, which would simply say "file not found" when trying to access an extended file. The file was obviously there, but Max simply didn't read it properly because of the offline attribute. It took many network traces with EMC support to figure that one out.

Going through that process redirected my suspicions from DX to the OS itself. DX seems to really do a good job of creating stub files transparent to the OS and applications, but I think both XP and Vista continue to have challenges where offline files are concerned when you are actually online. Hopefully the concept of extended files and stubs will evolve on both the OS and DX sides to make things more transparent in the future.