Paul, There currently is no way to disable the symlink functionality out of the box in 1.x. It is primarily used in two different places in storm, in pointing the worker to the workers-artifacts directory, and also in using blobs from the distributed cache. We expect more and more features to be built on top of these features so having symlinks be optional is not necessarily all that trivial. For the extra blobs it would require you to not use that feature at all. There are some key parts of the functionality that do not work without symlinks. For the worker artifacts we could provide an alternative way to tell the worker where this is, in addition to the symlink. That would not be too bad to do. If you want to you can file a JIRA for this that would be the best way, but I honestly don't know when someone would get around to working on it. If you are getting commercial support from someone you might want to contact them too. - Bobby
On Friday, August 12, 2016 4:56 AM, "paul.milli...@baesystems.com" <paul.milli...@baesystems.com> wrote: Hi all, (Following this up on the dev list, as I didn't receive any response on the user list.) We hoped to upgrade our system to Storm 1.0 (or above), however, due to security hardening on our systems (and client systems outside of our control), the documented methods to allow the blob store functionality to work (by making a group policy change to enable symlinks) on Windows are not possible for us. Is there any way to avoid the need for newer versions of Storm to create symlinks? Is there any way to disable this functionality if we don't explicitly require it? I couldn't find anything when looking through documentation other than the options run change group policy or run the supervisor as an administrator user. Regards Paul Milliken -----Original Message----- From: paul.milli...@baesystems.com [mailto:paul.milli...@baesystems.com] Sent: 20 July 2016 07:59 To: u...@storm.apache.org Subject: RE: Unable to run Storm 1.0.1 on Windows Hi, Just a quick summary/follow up in case the wall of text sent previously put people off. Is there any way to disable / avoid the need to create symlinks in newer versions of Storm so that it can be used in a more locked down Windows environment? Thanks Paul Milliken -----Original Message----- From: paul.milli...@baesystems.com [mailto:paul.milli...@baesystems.com] Sent: 18 July 2016 15:23 To: u...@storm.apache.org Subject: Unable to run Storm 1.0.1 on Windows Hello, We are using Storm as a core component of a large-scale document processing/analysis system. We have been developing this for a while now, starting with Storm 0.8 (I think). We are currently using Storm 0.10.0 and were hoping to upgrade to 1.0.1 (as the release notes indicate that some of the changes will potentially improve performance). Unfortunately, the new version does not run in our development environments as it now requires the ability to create symbolic links. The documentation at https://github.com/apache/storm/blob/master/docs/windows-users-guide.md indicates that this can be made to work by either running as an administrator or by changing a group policy setting. However, neither of these approaches is possible in our case, since we are working in a relatively locked-down environment. Running as an administrator is definitely not an appropriate workaround - not all our developers have administrator access (and even if they did, I would be very hesitant to advise them to run things as administrator). Our development process also means that we regularly stop, wipe out and restart the cluster, so we can't just run the supervisor once as a different user with the relevant permissions. Our intention is that things work out of the box (ie, unzip and run a script to get a working system) without needing to set up certain processes to be run separately. For added complication, the product that my team produces is then taken by consulting teams and potentially customized for each client. This work often happens on client sites, where being able to run as an administrator or change group policies is even less likely. In this scenario, simply being able to unpack a complete development environment with minimal requirements on the system is critical. All that said, is there any other way of getting newer versions of Storm to work on Windows without needing to either run as an administrator or make group policy changes? Since we started our development on earlier versions, we are not making any direct use of the functionality that this supports (we don't need to share filesystem resources between workers, since all our shared state is being kept in a database). Is there any way to disable the symlink creation, or have it fall back to just copying data instead? Thanks in advance, Paul Milliken Please consider the environment before printing this email. This message should be regarded as confidential. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender and destroy it immediately. Statements of intent shall only become binding when confirmed in hard copy by an authorised signatory. The contents of this email may relate to dealings with other companies under the control of BAE Systems Applied Intelligence Limited, details of which can be found at http://www.baesystems.com/Businesses/index.htm.