smithers and burns are part of a whole network of machines at IU which use the RedHat Global File System (GFS). This file system allows centralization of effort and has many advantages for production maintenance. GFS has unique quirks and can cause interesting problems in how paths are interpreted, especially by Wordpress and Rails.

The main challenge with this file system as of this writing is dealing with path names like so:

/home/gfs/cnets/www/givealink/

when we are attempting to refer to them like so:

/l/cnets/www/givealink/

For example, when running givealink/script/ferret_server -e production stop, we get this error:

Rails Error: Unable to access log file. Please ensure that /home/gfs/cnets/www/givealink/log/production.log exists and is chmod 0666. The log level has been raised to WARN and the output directed to STDERR until the problem is fixed. No such file or directory - /l/cnets/www/givealink/log/ferret_server.log