Follow Up Q: RE: Preferred Filesystem for Samba shares?

[YRLSEngr]

Please excuse my noobieness.

I'm building a Linux box (RH 8.0) that I intend to use to serve SMB shares to a small internal network of Windows PC's and MP3 clients (SliMP3s). The share is on a 180GB disk, and I want this to be mountable on the server, and viewable to all clients.

Does it matter which filesystem I use on the disk that has my SMB shares?

One wrinkle is that the server is currently configured as a dual boot machine (with Win 2K), so there would be some advantage to using FAT32 as the filesystem. This would allow me to access the disk from Win2K when the Samba server wasn't running, but this is not essential.

Am I best off using a Linux filesystem (like EXT2), or does it not matter?

Also, if I use FAT32 for the filesystem on the disk with the share, what is the correct command to mount this disk under Linux?

Thanks in advance.

Kit

 

[mjquilly]

it doesn't matter which type of filesystem you use, samba can share any type that the (sharing) OS recognizes. having said that, stick w/ FAT32 so you have the ability to read/write from win and linux.

to mount a FAT32 partition under linux:

mount -t vfat -o <whateveroptions> /devicename /mountpoint

man mount <- to get the options you want to use.

 

[Workin']

The only thing I would say is that using EXT3 as the filesystem gets you the advantages of a journaling file system, so there is a little more data protection in case of accidental reboots or power failure.

Plus I have heard horror stories of using FAT32 on huge disks. However I have several machines running 120GB FAT32 disks without problems. So maybe that's not an issue...

 

[YRLSEngr]

mjquilly/Workin' -

I ended up creating an ext2 partition, which mounts fine.

Followup Q:

To make this disk a valid smb share (viewable by other nodes ont he network), do I need to explicitly mount it first (using the mount command), or does smbd do the mount for me? I believe I have a valid smb.conf file (according to testparm). I'm using Webmin, if that makes a difference.


Thanks in advance, I appreciate the advice.

Kit

 

[Nothinman]

I would avoid ext2, it works well enough but it's unjournaled so if you shutdown uncleanly you'll have to run fsck on thet partition which takes quite a while on large partitions.

If you want that mount point shared you need to setup a share in smb.conf, it doesn't happen automatically.

 

[Flatline]

I believe you can convert ext2 to ext3 "on the fly", but I've never actually tried it....

 

[Nothinman]

Yes you can, all you do is add the journal inode.

 

[YRLSEngr]

If you want that mount point shared you need to setup a share in smb.conf, it doesn't happen automatically.

Thanks, I do have it defined in smb.conf. My question was whether defining the share in smb.conf actually mounts the share, or whether it has to be mounted in a separate (prior) operation for smb.conf to be able to see it.

I would avoid ext2, it works well enough but it's unjournaled so if you shutdown uncleanly you'll have to run fsck on thet partition which takes quite a while on large partitions.

The partition is empty, so based on the advice above, I'll just start over and make it ext3.


Cheers.

Kit

 

[skyking]

you need to mount the drive or slice in Fstab(fstab is in freebsd, use redhat's equivalent), and /or create the directory referred to in smb.conf.
smb.conf does not create or mount directories by itself.

 

[Nothinman]

Thanks, I do have it defined in smb.conf. My question was whether defining the share in smb.conf actually mounts the share, or whether it has to be mounted in a separate (prior) operation for smb.conf to be able to see it.

Samba doesn't know or care about mount points, if you share a directory it's shared as is whether something is mounted there or not. If you don't mount the drive to the share directory it'll still be shared, it'll just be empty.

The partition is empty, so based on the advice above, I'll just start over and make it ext3.

Just read the man page for tune2fs and add the journal, it's not hard and it'll get you used to reading man pages =)

 

[YRLSEngr]

Thanks for the patient replies, it makes perfect sense.

I actually have been reading man pages, but the number of options available for each command is a little daunting.

Cheers.

Kit