[H-GEN] Best FS for use with multiple Unix variants

QuarkAV.com - Hilton Travis hilton at quarkav.com
Sun Aug 16 16:31:52 EDT 2009


G'day Tony,

Long time no speak - glad you're still around the traps!  :)

I agree that the childish jibes and face making of recent has not been 
good.  I've been reading it *all* and silently crying (metaphorically) 
here about the sad state of affairs and poor light it places HUMBUG and 
OSS in - there's no "team" spirit here at all, it seems.  (Sure, that's 
a generalization, but I have no intention of naming any particular 
members as being better or worse than anyone else.)  HUMBUG is about (or 
so I thought) encouraging and supporting home Unix (& etc) usage, 
however recently it appears to be all about penis size.

Anyone on a Committee (as I am, but not for HUMBUG) needs to have a 
thick skin as has been mentioned before and anyone not on the Committee 
needs to realise that the Committee members are doing this all 
voluntarily so that the group as a whole benefits from their efforts.  
All members, Committee or general, need to realise that working as a 
team takes an effort and that not everyone will have the same goals, 
input nor expectations, but the aim should be the same - to improve 
HUMBUG and its members' experiences with Unix (& etc).

Now, as to the FS to choose, I'd recommend against EXT3 as it is nigh on 
impossible to recover data from as was recently discussed when I had a 
client who had a HDD die in an NSLU2 device which is formatted as EXT3.  
I asked in a number of places (including in here) and unfortunately 
no-one came up with anything that helped.  Of course backups help, but 
only in hindsight (this wasn't *originally* an IT client of ours or he'd 
have had backups).

NTFS would be perfect if there was a stable read/write NTFS filesystem 
driver for various *nix flavors.  I've not heard of "fuse" before, but 
will have a look into it.  One question as to ZFS: How easy is it to 
recover data if it fails - what sort of tools exist for it?

- Hilton Travis


On 16/08/2009 10:04 PM, Tony Bilbrough wrote:
> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
>
> G'day All,
> nice to see that we are once more back on sensible computer discussion.
> The childish rhetoric of these past weeks has been  bland and 
> unnecessary.
> No matter what our more literary artistic protagonists may believe.
>
> If I am not be able to make it to the meeting on September 5 I will 
> give my vote to Russell Stuart. If I am able to make it I will be 
> guided [as ever] by the out going committee or the most lucid speaker.
>
> cheers Tony
>
> Daniel Devine wrote:
>
>> The answer is probably Fat32 which has a pretty major restriction
>> which I am sure you already know of.
>>
>> EXT support for FreeBSD and Solaris is quite bad as far as I know and
>> I am unsure about Mac OSX.
>>
>> If you want a FS that can handle files greater than 3.5 GB then I
>> think you will have to use fuse modules. With the use of fuse you
>> could actually use ZFS on all of these systems (yay!).
>>
>> Of course- just transferring over the (Gbit) LAN  and having the disks
>> and formatted in whatever FS suits the system they are attached to is
>> how I would deal with this.
>>
>> Just use whatever utility that can deal with the file system. The
>> tools are usually built into the respective OS.
>>
>> On 8/16/09, Greg Black <gjb at yaxom.com> wrote:
> Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
>>>
>>> I have some external HDDs (both eSATA and USB) that I use for
>>> additional backups of data on my home network.  The machines on
>>> the home network run a mix of FreeBSD (UFS), Linux (ext2, ext3),
>>> Mac OS-X (HFS+) and Solaris (ZFS).
>>>
>>> What I need is an on-disk FS that I can use that will allow all
>>> those systems to both write and read the external disk.  Since
>>> some of the machines are limited to USB, the result has to work
>>> for an external USB disk.
>>>
>>> If anybody has an answer and preferably the utility and OS to
>>> use to setup the disk in the first place, I'd be grateful for
>>> pointers.
>>>
>>> This is not an invitation to speculate, as I can do that myself
>>> and have already done quite a bit of it without a useful
>>> result.  Please reply direct to me.  I will provide a summary of
>>> the information to the list when I have a result.
>>>
>>> Greg




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