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Sharing a Firewire Drive Between Mac and Linux?
jhealy1024 asks: "I was getting short of disk space on my iBook, so I got an external 100GB FireWire drive to expand my storage space. It works like a charm, and so my storage problems are relieved -- for now. Then I realized that my Linux server has several IEEE 1394 ports on it -- maybe I could use the drive to back up files from my Linux server as well! Unfortunately, after an afternoon of frustration, I haven't been able to do it. The problem seems to be that there are no (fully working) formats that both the Linux box and the Mac can use. HFS+ and UFS are supported by both machines, but write support on the Linux side is reportedly still in beta for both. I don't feel that I can trust it yet for backing up files. I've tried UDF, but the versions aren't compatible (Linux likes 2+, and OSX only goes to 1.5). Not to mention, Mac OS doesn't seem to like a whole block device formatted as UDF (mmm... kernel panic). The closest I got was by using FAT32 as the partition type, which does work on both machines. Unfortunately, the max file size is 4GB, which won't cut it if I use the Mac for DVD mastering or DV editing (20 minutes of video == 4+GB). I know I could just partition the drive, but I'd really just like to share files on one device (especially things like MP3s). Has anyone found a good way to share physical devices between Mac OS X and Linux?"
HFS+ support for Linux is almost non-existant. There are tools to do it, but they're kludgy. HFS (no plus) is supported, IIRC. Your best bet may be to have a separate HFS partition and use it as a temporary storage disk--mount it in OS X, copy files to it, mount it in Linux, get the files off, copy any Linux files you need in OS X to it, etc.
It's not going to help it, see its post:
I've tried UDF, but the versions aren't compatible (Linux likes 2+, and OSX only goes to 1.5). Not to mention, Mac OS doesn't seem to like a whole block device formatted as UDF (mmm... kernel panic).
Not the best solution but a solution never the less would be two partitions on the disk. One parition set up as HFS+ for the DVD mastering since you require support for large files and another as a FAT32 for sharing of files between the Mac and Linux systems.
Since you didn't mention DVD mastering on the Linux box I'll assume you don't do that. HFS+ read support is support under linux (write support has a warning of being dangerous the last time I compiled a kernel). If required you could still back up the large files from the DVD mastering partition to the Linux machine - you just couldn't safely write them back (you could use something like sftp, or rsync to copy them over an network connection if required later on).
It's been a while since I submitted this article, so I'll bring you guys up to speed on my other attempts:
While I appreciate the two-partition suggestions, they're not quite what I'm looking for, as I don't want to split the disk in half for the two different machines. The "transfer partition" (a small partition in HFS that both machines can read) idea is a good one, but when I get to that point it's easier to just network the machines together and copy the files rather than waste the disk space.
On that front, I've tried NFS and Samba between the linux box and the ibook, without much success. I suspect it may have to do with large file support on the linux side.
The NFS mount works okay, but then randomly craps out (I get read errors) on large files. I've tried tuning the NFS connection params (different version numbers, TCP/UDP, buffer sizes) without much luck.
With Samba, I'm smacking into the large file size limit on linux. I wanted to try an SMB mount from the linux to the ibook. The ibook seems to be exporting the full sizes on the files, but the linux size can't see files over 2GB. I've recompiled Samba on both, but that didn't help. Therefore, I think I need to patch my kernel for large file support in SMBfs and try again.
I just bought Jaguar, so I'm hoping that I might get a little help in the new release. Also, I haven't tried AFS yet... =)
In spite of the hasty moderation, this is not a bad suggestion at all. Captain Pedantic was suggesting to use tar in the mode which writes directly to the disk without any filesystem. Tar has this ability primarily so that it can write to tapes, which don't have filesystems, but it can be used with any device. Since tar uses the same format on both OSes (or at least GNU tar does, which is available for both), the data should be available to both. Plus, tar works well with big files. The big drawback is that this will only work for backing up and restoring; you can't use the files directly from the disk with any program other than tar.
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.
The poster was talking about the file size limit, not the partition size. I double checked MSDN to be sure, and both FAT16 and FAT32 limit files to 2^32 - 1 bytes. It's a shame OS X can't use NTFS. The file size limit there is 2^64 - 1 bytes. That much pr0n and MP3 can kill a man. :-)
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