Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:54:42 +0200 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: "Thomas Mueller" <mueller6727@bellsouth.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Lingua franca file system Linux-NetBSD-FreeBSD? Message-ID: <20100824125442.25f45233.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <4c739685.g1aaLUnEPIT1pDne%mueller6727@bellsouth.net> References: <4c739685.g1aaLUnEPIT1pDne%mueller6727@bellsouth.net>
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On Tue, 24 Aug 2010 09:53:09 +0000, "Thomas Mueller" <mueller6727@bellsouth.net> wrote: > There is the obvious possibility of using msdos (FAT32); I could > run FreeDOS on such a partition as well as using the partition to > share data between Linux, NetBSD and FreeBSD, and FreeDOS too. > Drawback is some problems getting long file names straight, and > lack of case sensitivity. But maybe FAT32 is the safest choice? There is a way around this: Put the files to be transferred into a tar archive. In this way, only the archives name will have to obey 8.3, and its content will keep intact (case sensitive long file names); the only downside is that extraction in DOS will result in 8.3 filenames again (there's TAR.EXE for DOS). Know that tar is the "most universal file system". :-) I did use this approach in the past when having to fransfer files between non-networked UNIX and Linux systems via floppy disk: Simply used tar directly on the device (which's device name was of course different on all the systems). > Linux, NetBSD and FreeBSD are supposed to be able to read and > write NTFS partition, but I see from a very recent thread on > this list, subject "Re: External HD", that writing to NTFS > partition is very dangerous, and I figure that would be also > true for NetBSD and Linux, and any other non-MS-Windows-NT-line > OS that might have support for NTFS. NTFS is known to be an unstable file system. > There is also the caveat that such a data-sharing partition would > have to be in a primary or extended/logical slice/partition, > since Linux seems unable to read BSD disklabels, and NetBSD and > FreeBSD can't read each other's disklabels. Linux and DOS do, as far as I remember, only operate on slice level. Partitioned slices (such as FreeBSD uses them) are a bit problematic. With 4 slices (so called "DOS primary partitions") a disk is "full". > Also, Linux and the BSDs go separate ways with some newer file > systems (ext4fs, btrfs, jfs in Linux; zfs in FreeBSD). An option would be to avoid the file system level at all. Maybe that's not a solution to your requirements, but let me mention this: In a interoperability environment, I did use a disk enclosure with built-in FTP server. In this way, all OSes can r/w access its content via FTP. There are no limits regarding 8.3 filenames. Even MacOS X runs well in such a setting. The downside, of course, is that you have to run a FTP session for every transfer (instead of just mounting a disk's partition), but it's basically no problem to use a kind of "FTP-backed file system", I think I have seen this in some KDE or Gnome... -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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