The data loaders may be running on a different machine (or group of machines) from the production site that creates the log files. Therefore the machines will typically use some file-sharing mechanism such as NFS, and thus may require different pathnames to access the same files. For example, the directory /u1/logfiles/ on the production environment might be accessed as /nfs/livesite/u1/logfiles/ on the loader environment.

To make it easier to share files, the loggers and loaders always specify files relative to a root location, rather than using absolute paths. You configure each component to point to this root location by setting the component’s defaultRoot property to the correct pathname for the machine the component is running on. In the example above, you would set defaultRoot for the loggers to /u1/logfiles/, and set defaultRoot for the loaders to /nfs/livesite/u1/logfiles/.