Re: Removable drives
Christopher Sean Hilton [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I have a question to the community about removable drives, pendrives and usb and firewire attached hard drives. I'm just wondering how people are dealing with them in FreeBSD. I don't have any operational problems with them. I'm just wondering if I'm doing things the hard way. There are advantages and disadvantages to all the approaches I know. First Question: Which filesystem are people using on usb flash drives and removable hard drives? I'm using a mixture of ufs2, ext2, and msdos. I'm using ufs2 because I'm also using cfs to encrypt the contents and although I haven't tested this, I'm fairly certain cfs want's semantics that aren't in the msdos filesystem. FAT filesystems are a reasonable match for most of the uses of portable disks, particularly things like music players and cameras. Doing anything more specialized, though, and your own unique needs will quickly drive the decision. Second Question: Are most people using vfs_usermount=1? I'm using the automounter. It's a little bit more work to setup but I'm using a laptop and since I've started to use the automounter the number of times that I've had to fsck my removable drive because I've suspended my laptop with a pendrive still attached and mounted has been reduced incredibly. One of the nice things about FAT filesystems, aside from the ubiquity of support, is that you can use the mtools so that you don't need to mount the filesystem in the first place. This is a good match for how *I* use portable drives, but may not help you out the same way. Another option is to use the raw device. For things like backups, this works well, because you can just direct the output of tar directly to the device. Or pass it through compression and encryption filters on the way. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Removable drives
On Wed, 2006-03-29 at 08:43 -0500, Lowell Gilbert wrote: Christopher Sean Hilton [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: [snip] First Question: Which filesystem are people using on usb flash drives and removable hard drives? I'm using a mixture of ufs2, ext2, and msdos. I'm using ufs2 because I'm also using cfs to encrypt the contents and although I haven't tested this, I'm fairly certain cfs want's semantics that aren't in the msdos filesystem. FAT filesystems are a reasonable match for most of the uses of portable disks, particularly things like music players and cameras. Doing anything more specialized, though, and your own unique needs will quickly drive the decision. The ubiquity is the only advantage that I have found with FAT. I use FAT on my MP3 player and my Camera because it's the only choice that I have. I have been tempted to use fdisk to put a small FreeBSD partition at the end of my MP3 player. But that's completely specialized for me. Basically for the cost of one song I can have my MP3 player automatically sync a couple of podcasts when I plug it into my FreeBSD box. The nice thing about FAT is that it's Read/Write across all the operating systems that I use. Second Question: Are most people using vfs_usermount=1? I'm using the automounter. It's a little bit more work to setup but I'm using a laptop and since I've started to use the automounter the number of times that I've had to fsck my removable drive because I've suspended my laptop with a pendrive still attached and mounted has been reduced incredibly. One of the nice things about FAT filesystems, aside from the ubiquity of support, is that you can use the mtools so that you don't need to mount the filesystem in the first place. This is a good match for how *I* use portable drives, but may not help you out the same way. I used mtools for a while. I stopped when I started using Gnome. Using mtools avoids the big problem that I had, corruption of the filesystem on the device when I suspend my laptop while the filesystem is still mount R/W. In a Gnome environment I found that the cost was too high. That's when I revisited the automounter. The automounter will automatically mount a filesystem on demand. Demand comes when a process tries to access a file within a directory controlled by the automounter. I can mount my the flash drive by simply doing: $ ls -l /amd/pendrive/ And I can request an unmount by doing: $ amq -u /amd/pendrive The unmount only happens if no process is accessing the directory which can get tricky in a GUI environment but that's a question for another list. The best thing about this is that I don't have to compromise security on the system by setting vfs_usermount to 1 although some would say that the cost (configuring /etc/fstab and amd) is high. -- chris ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
File backed, rather than device backed, UFS filesystem Was - Re: Removable drives
On Wed, 2006-03-29 at 08:43 -0500, Lowell Gilbert wrote: [snip] Another option is to use the raw device. For things like backups, this works well, because you can just direct the output of tar directly to the device. Or pass it through compression and encryption filters on the way. I wonder if there is a way to do a file backed UFS filesystem with the file on an MS-DOS partition. That may be a way to go. -- chris ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Removable drives
One of the big changes from moving from the Linux kernel to BSD is the device naming system, so I have pretty much gotten the habit of manually mounting/umounting when needed. For the filesystem question, I usually use ext2- compatible with linux, bsd, and write support on a msft operating system is slowly reaching a stable state. I dojn't believe darwin has ext2/3 support by default, but i might me wrong. the only issues i've had with fat32 are naming limitations, its 4gb limitation, and setting file ownerships. On 3/28/06, Luke Dean [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Christopher Sean Hilton wrote: I have a question to the community about removable drives, pendrives and usb and firewire attached hard drives. I'm just wondering how people are dealing with them in FreeBSD. I don't have any operational problems with them. I'm just wondering if I'm doing things the hard way. First Question: Which filesystem are people using on usb flash drives and removable hard drives? I'm using a mixture of ufs2, ext2, and msdos. I'm using ufs2 because I'm also using cfs to encrypt the contents and although I haven't tested this, I'm fairly certain cfs want's semantics that aren't in the msdos filesystem. I use msdosfs because I use my portable devices with MS Windows systems and digital cameras frequently, and I need compatibility more than anything else. Second Question: Are most people using vfs_usermount=1? I'm using the automounter. It's a little bit more work to setup but I'm using a laptop and since I've started to use the automounter the number of times that I've had to fsck my removable drive because I've suspended my laptop with a pendrive still attached and mounted has been reduced incredibly. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. --- Benjamin Franklin ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Removable drives
On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Christopher Sean Hilton wrote: I have a question to the community about removable drives, pendrives and usb and firewire attached hard drives. I'm just wondering how people are dealing with them in FreeBSD. I don't have any operational problems with them. I'm just wondering if I'm doing things the hard way. First Question: Which filesystem are people using on usb flash drives and removable hard drives? I'm using a mixture of ufs2, ext2, and msdos. I'm using ufs2 because I'm also using cfs to encrypt the contents and although I haven't tested this, I'm fairly certain cfs want's semantics that aren't in the msdos filesystem. I use msdosfs because I use my portable devices with MS Windows systems and digital cameras frequently, and I need compatibility more than anything else. Second Question: Are most people using vfs_usermount=1? I'm using the automounter. It's a little bit more work to setup but I'm using a laptop and since I've started to use the automounter the number of times that I've had to fsck my removable drive because I've suspended my laptop with a pendrive still attached and mounted has been reduced incredibly. I define the device to /etc/fstab with the noauto option, then explicitly mount and unmount the device as necessary. If I happen to need to mounst more than one of these devices at a time, I study the device numbers and read man pages until I remember how to mount something by its device name. So no, you're not doing things the hard way. :) ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
