OT question about Macbook (OS X) file systems

[Rick Stevens]

Dean S. Messing wrote:
> George N. White III wrote:
>> On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, Dean S. Messing wrote:
>>
>>> I just purchaced a Macbook for my daughter as she's off to college 
>>> (required by the dept. she's in).  I'm wondering if OS X understands the 
>>> ext3 filesysystem.  In particular, will it properly handle symlinks 
>>> generated under linux?  I wd. like to give her a USB disk containing an 
>>> ext3 filesystem (that has lots of symlinks) with her 25 Gig organised 
>>> classical music library on it (done on an F8 system).
>> Why not just set up the USB disk using the mac and rsync the files
>> across via networking?
> 
> Thanks for the suggestion, George.
> 
> Were I to bring my own (FC-6) laptop to Chicago, where she's attending
> school, that might be an option.  We'll pick up the MacBook at the
> bookstore there on Thurday.  But I have not a clue about how to get
> networking working on it, so even if I brought my own linux laptop
> (for truly local area networking) I'm not sure of myself at all.
> 
> What I'd hoped to do is be able to hand her the drive and have it "just
> work".  She knows as much about computers in general as I do about
> Macs (zero).  (She spent all her free time the last 7 years training
> to be a concert grade pianist :-)
> 
> She'll likely be on the network in a few days via the school's IT dept.
> but then I have no idea if I'd be able to get 25-30Gigs of data to her
> via rsync/ssh. Does the school disallow it through their firewall?
> Does the Mac have the server for me to connect to?  I don't know
> the answer to any of these.  
> 
> Besides this (andthe Macbook) was suppose to be my (hassle-free) gift
> to her. :-)
> 
> 
>> OS X doesn't do ext3.  You might be able to create an HFS+ filesystem
>> (I mount my HFS+ iPOD and write to it with linux, but there are
>> warnings "write on journalled filesystem not supported").  OS X does
>> have zfs and linux has fuse+zfs, so that might be worth a try too.
> 
> I just called the local Apple store and they said that zfs is not
> natively supported under OS X (yet).  The 4 that are, are:
> XFS, XFS+, Fat, and NTFS.
> 
> I suppose I can write an NTFS FS to the drive but I don't
> know if the symlinks will work.  I think I read that true NTFS symlinks
> are a recent thing.  I'l look into creating an HFS+ FS under linux
> (with journalling turned off as per your warning above.
> I've got till tomorrow to solve this.  That's when I fly out.

The simplest thing is to use vfat on the pen drive.  Most of them come
preformatted with vfat and both Linux and OS/X can handle them fine.
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer                       rps2 at nerd.com -
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