Re: firewire / hfs volumes (continued)
At 1043152597s since epoch (01/21/03 07:36:37 -0500 UTC), Matt Price wrote:
> I run debian woody at work, and macos 9 at home. I'd like to start
> backing up both systems on an external ieee1394 drive (not yet
> purchased).
I'm in a similar situation. I have an iBook with OSX on it, and I've
been trying to share a firewire drive between it and my linux box. I
too was looking for a stable solution, to the point where I "Asked
Slashdot" (I know, I know...)
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/19/0522238
> -does woody (running on x86) work stably with hfs volumes? I seem to
> remember there were some issues areound it.
The upshot is this: you can use the HFS+ utils for linux under woody
(I've done as much). However, those are not a "direct-mount" type of
deal; you have to use a special set of commands to mount and examine
the filesystem, which is a bit of a pain. I tried it for a while, but
finally gave up because it was too time-intensive to use special tools
to see the files. Also, the tools all come with dire warnings about
beta software and potential instabilities. While they seemed fine, if
this is for backing up you should be extra careful.
> -If I get one large drive (I'm thinking 160gb) will woody be able to
> see all of it? I know that there used to be some problems with the
> mac around large drives, but haven't found anything about linux
> andthis problem.
I'm not even sure if the Mac can see that much yet, so I'd be
careful. As for the linux box, you should be okay. It's more a
function of the firewire bridge on the hard drive than on the firewire
interface on your machine (linux sees the firewire drives as "SCSI"
drives, not really IDE).
> - (I guess this is 3) how would folks recommend I initialize and
> partition the drive? From my mac, or from my woody box?
Partition on the mac and mount on the debian box. If you want to
split the drive into two partitions (say, ext2 and hfs+), partition on
the mac, and then format the empty partition on the linux box.
You might also try a filesystem type usable by both machines; FAT32 is
read/writeable by both linux and mac. The only drawbacks are lack of
permissions metadata, possible filename truncation to 8.3, and a file
size limit of 4GB (e.g., you can't backup DVD images or large media
files).
For the curious, what I ended up doing was just mounting the drive
over the network on the iBook. That way I had HFS+ formatting and
native access for the mac. Since my machines are both here at home,
the network is quick enough for most copy operations. I can easily
back files up from the debian box to the mac over the network using
tar and rsync.
That may not help you, since your machines are in different places,
but it is an option.
Good luck!
Jason
--
Jason Healy
http://www.logn.net/
Reply to: