Xsan: Unable to enable case insensitivity on a volume

Xsan 2.3 introduces the ability to create case insensitive volumes. You can also change case sensitivity after you create a volume.

Note: If a volume is currently case sensitive, you may not be able to change the volume to case insensitive due to name collisions.

For example on a case sensitive volume, a file named "Bob" and a file named "bob" in the same folder would be recognized as two separate files. However, a case insensitive file system would not allow this as it would consider these the same file name (a name collision).

When you try to change a volume to case insensitive, you may receive an alert that says:

Failed to enable case insensitivity.

Two or more files or folders have names that differ only in capitalization. Please correct this and try again.

Determining name collisions

If there are name collisions, you can run this Terminal command to determine which files are colliding:

grep case-collide /var/run/xsan_cvupdatefs_(volume-name).log

Example result of this command:

Checking directories *Error*: Dir 0xf: files 0x11/'Bob.rtf' and 0x10/'bob.rtf' case-collide.

The directory 0xf has two colliding files, Bob.rtf and bob.rtf.

To determine which directory 0xf is first convert the inode 0xf to it's decimal equivalent. In this case, 15. Then, run the command:

sudo find /Volumes/<name_of_xsan_volume/ -inum 15

Learn more

On a case insensitive volume, objects with colliding names will either need to be put in separate folders, or one of the objects will need to have its name changed.