OpenSuSE 10.3 somewhat noobish question - Samba and NTFS drives

[Linflas]

I took an old KR7A-RAID machine and installed OpenSuSE 10.3 on it. My plan is to use it as a simple Samba server to make use of a bunch of non-SATA IDE drives I have sitting around with data on them. This board can support 8 IDE devices so it is perfect for this. The drives are all formatted NTFS so my question is can I just stick them in and share them with Samba or will I need to move the data off of them and reformat them using a Linux format like ext3?

 

[xSauronx]

from http://en.opensuse.org/NTFS

openSUSE 10.3

The ntfs-3g is installed by default and write support is enabled.

Modify /etc/fstab to reflect umask=0002

For example

SATA or PATA (IDE) drive

#Device Mountpoint Filesystem Parameters
/dev/sda1 /windows/C ntfs-3g user,users,gid=users,umask=0002,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

Other options

#Device Mountpoint Filesystem Parameters
/dev/disk/by-label/win /windows/C ntfs-3g user,users,gid=users,umask=0002,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

 

[ch33zw1z]

Good choice of OS Linflas

 

[Nothinman]

Even though you can technically write to NTFS fairly safely these days it's still a much better idea to backup/restore the data onto a native Linux filesystem.

 

[Linflas]

I have it all up and running and am amazed at how easy it turned out to be. About the only stumbling block I ran into was not being able to access the share on my first test drive. It kept rejecting my username/password when I would try to browse it from Vista. I finally figured out that I needed to add my username/password to the smbpasswd database. Once I did that everything has worked like a charm.

xSauronx - Thanks for the link, that and a couple others I found were a great resource for helping me figure out how put the entries in fstab to get the drives mounted and visible at boot.

ch33zw1z - We use Novell Netware at work and everything is slowly moving over to SLES servers so I have been downloading various versions of SuSE and messing around with them there so OpenSuSE seemed a good choice for this since anything I learn will be helpful down the road.

Nothinman - My current plans are to only read from the shares and empty the drives by copying whatever I want to keep into a temp area on one of my windows boxes. After that is done I will convert the drives I want to use for read/write to a native Linux fs.