Want to switch my windows file server to linux, need some help

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: cleverhandle

NTFS: Saves the OP from having to do a one-time copy of data between disks; it's 1337 to use on Linux

f1xx0r3d

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: tw1164
I know its a pain in the ass, but I would still burn all your data to dvds. You may want to use DL dvds to dull the pain (if you have the money, or can find a good deal).

Personally, I would never trust important data to JUST a DVD, especially a DL DVD.

One more opinion:
By the time the OP learns Linux, he/she could certainly have solved the original Windows Server installation problem.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I've given my opinion, as an opinion, and I stand by it. You give yours as a fact, but I think it's just an opinion after all, and of course we can have differing opinions based on different experiences, wishes, etc., etc.

But have you tried an installation of FC5 or Ubuntu recently? It's almost completely automated, the only way it could fail is if you have a storage controller that's not supported and that's pretty rare. How easy it is to use after the installation is of course opinion, but the fact that the installation is simpler than Windows is just that, a fact.

Eh, well, let's be honest here. There really isn't much difference between installing Windows and installing Ubuntu or FC5. Each basically asks for partitioning, time zone, user account and password, and network info. The only advantage I see goes to FC5 (and other distros that use Anaconda) due to asking all the questions at once and then doing all the processing and copying at once as opposed to answer question, wait .... answer question, wait .... answer question, wait .... Other than that the complexity isn't really different in any of them.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
coolred: you should always back up any data you want to keep. Always.

Microsoft Windows driver files are copyrighted by Microsoft corporation and
therefore they were not supplied along with this project.

That's sad.

There isn't a better choice than ext3fs right now for Linux. It's supported by everything (BSDs included in ext2 compatibility mode), it's stable, and it isn't horribly slow.

XFS is arguably better. It's proven to be just as stable, maybe a tad less supported and compatible to the point of being trivial, but with much better performance.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: tw1164
I know its a pain in the ass, but I would still burn all your data to dvds. You may want to use DL dvds to dull the pain (if you have the money, or can find a good deal).

Personally, I would never trust important data to JUST a DVD, especially a DL DVD.

One more opinion:
By the time the OP learns Linux, he/she could certainly have solved the original Windows Server installation problem.

This is why I would suggest using OpenFiler

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Brazen
XFS is arguably better. It's proven to be just as stable, maybe a tad less supported and compatible to the point of being trivial, but with much better performance.

You can argue, but it won't mean anything.

ext is supported by more than just 2 operating systems.
xfs is only in the unstable line of kernels and a patchset(?) of 2.4.
There is talk about the type of hardware required to run XFS correctly, and I don't know anyone off hand that has that hardware. I don't know how true this is though.

The first two alone are worth not bothering with it.

 

[Nothinman]

Eh, well, let's be honest here. There really isn't much difference between installing Windows and installing Ubuntu or FC5. Each basically asks for partitioning, time zone, user account and password, and network info. The only advantage I see goes to FC5 (and other distros that use Anaconda) due to asking all the questions at once and then doing all the processing and copying at once as opposed to answer question, wait .... answer question, wait .... answer question, wait .... Other than that the complexity isn't really different in any of them.

That and if you have relatively new hardware you have to supply a storage driver disk via F6 with Windows. And after the installation is done you'll most likely have to install video, NIC and sound drivers seperately on Windows.

ext is supported by more than just 2 operating systems.

If the users/developers of those OSes want XFS support they should start working on it. AFAIK the on-disk format is set in stone for Irix compatibility (although a few of the things have 2 versions) so it's not like reverse engineering NTFS. Since XFS was released under the GPL and us Linux users have support for it, I can't really blame them for not caring to rewrite it for other OSes.

xfs is only in the unstable line of kernels and a patchset(?) of 2.4.

I get the joke here but 2.6 is considered stable, although it's more akin to Debian etch in that major changes are allowed in as long as they don't affect anything else. There were some muckups wrt udev, but that's because gregkh is an ass and Linus didn't notice. Since then gregkh has been put in his place and we shouldn't see anything like that again.

There is talk about the type of hardware required to run XFS correctly, and I don't know anyone off hand that has that hardware. I don't know how true this is though.

It performs best on hardware that supports write barriers, but if they're not support it will fallback to software barriers so it still works, it's just a bit slower.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
If the users/developers of those OSes want XFS support they should start working on it. AFAIK the on-disk format is set in stone for Irix compatibility (although a few of the things have 2 versions) so it's not like reverse engineering NTFS. Since XFS was released under the GPL and us Linux users have support for it, I can't really blame them for not caring to rewrite it for other OSes.

It's under the wrong license, and apprently no one has wanted to rewrite it.

I get the joke here but 2.6 is considered stable, although it's more akin to Debian etch in that major changes are allowed in as long as they don't affect anything else. There were some muckups wrt udev, but that's because gregkh is an ass and Linus didn't notice. Since then gregkh has been put in his place and we shouldn't see anything like that again.

2.6 is the development tree, not the stable tree. Hopefully they'll correct that soon.

 

[Nothinman]

It's under the wrong license, and apprently no one has wanted to rewrite it.

As I said, it's under the right license for Linux. It's OSS and we already have support for it, why would we write drivers for OSes that we don't use?

2.6 is the development tree, not the stable tree. Hopefully they'll correct that soon.

It's considered stable enough, I really doubt that'll change any time soon.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
As I said, it's under the right license for Linux. It's OSS and we already have support for it, why would we write drivers for OSes that we don't use?

I didn't say you should. I don't think I even hinted at something like that.

Off the top of your head do you know of any distros that use XFS by default?

It's considered stable enough, I really doubt that'll change any time soon.

That's a shame. Maybe if they had a different development version they'd be able to at least pay lip service to wireless support...

 

[drag]

ext3 is fine.

The only real issue against it is that it isn't going to scale much longer. You start running into issues when going to multi terrabyte volume sizes.. Then you hit a hard limit at 8 terrabytes, I beleive.

Other then that it has a lot going for it. Out of all the file systems Linux supports it probably has supports the level of data integrity. It has highest compatability with other operating systems. It is the most thouroughly used and test file system aviable. It's fsck is proven and effective also there is other considurations put into ext3 to deal with PC-level hardware that JFS and XFS folks don't have to deal with since their original stuff didn't suck.

Basicly the idea is that with XFS/JFS/ReiserFS they care most about file system integrety. Especially ReiserFSv3's fsck will just delete massive amounts of files to ensure file system integrety. Ext3 on the other hand was designed to also care about the data in your files on that file system.

For large files and/or large enterprise stuff JFS and XFS are pretty snazy. You have good hardware with good power supplies and backups.

But all three (xfs, jfs, ext3) are very nice. Real world performance differences are negligable except under certain specific circumstances. (Like those used in benchmarks)

The Linuxmafia knowledge base has good information based on the experiances of experianced admins using this stuff in the real world. http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Filesystems

Of course like everything in Linux. File systems improve as time goes buy. XFS is suppose to handle crashes much more gracefully now then it did in the past.

 

[coolred]

Okay, but how do I go about copying the data from one drive to the next. Linux only sees the drive that it is installed on, so what do I need to do to back up the data?

 

[Brazen]

you need to mount the other drives. I'm not much of an expert on exactly how you should go about doing this. I just use webmin for this and sometimes edit /etc/fstab directly to tune how I want volumes mounted.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: coolred
Okay, but how do I go about copying the data from one drive to the next. Linux only sees the drive that it is installed on, so what do I need to do to back up the data?

Nah....you've got to let the Linux guys argue about which distribution of Linux and which file system to use and which GPL.....before they can come around to answering your question.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: coolred
Okay, but how do I go about copying the data from one drive to the next. Linux only sees the drive that it is installed on, so what do I need to do to back up the data?

Mount the NTFS partition read-only under Linux:

mount -t ntfs -o ro /dev/hdb1 /mnt

where hdb = your old disk (look in your dmesg output if you're not sure what it is), 1 = the partition on that disk (probably 1), and /mnt is an empty, temporary mountpoint (which /mnt is by default on most distros).

Figure out where you want to keep your data on the new disk and make a directory for it:

mkdir /new/data/path

Then, if you want to copy the entire disk, do

cp -a /mnt/* /new/data/path

Of if you only want a specific folder...

cp -a /mnt/my/data/folder /new/data/path

Either way, the data will probably end up readable only by root, so you'll want to change the ownership and permissions to something that makes sense for you.

find /new/data/path -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find /new/data/path -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
chown -R myusername.mygroupname /new/data/path

Unmount the drive and you're done...

umount /mnt

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: coolred
Okay, but how do I go about copying the data from one drive to the next. Linux only sees the drive that it is installed on, so what do I need to do to back up the data?

Nah....you've got to let the Linux guys argue about which distribution of Linux and which file system to use and which GPL.....before they can come around to answering your question.

If people wouldn't have wrong opinions, it wouldn't be an issue

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Nah....you've got to let the Linux guys argue about which distribution of Linux and which file system to use and which GPL.....before they can come around to answering your question.

How cute and snarky. But I actually prefer *nix more because I like getting stuff done quickly, and less for the endlessly amusing philosophical debates.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: cleverhandle

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Nah....you've got to let the Linux guys argue about which distribution of Linux and which file system to use and which GPL.....before they can come around to answering your question.

How cute and snarky. But I actually prefer *nix more because I like getting stuff done quickly, and less for the endlessly amusing philosophical debates.

Hmm, well, there are times when I prefer it for gettting stuff done, but other than the fact that it's free for me, I like it because of the philosophy. Sometimes, I freedom is more important than taking the easy way (yes, there are occasions when Windows is the easy way, though usually only in the short term).

 

[coolred]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: coolred
Okay, but how do I go about copying the data from one drive to the next. Linux only sees the drive that it is installed on, so what do I need to do to back up the data?

Nah....you've got to let the Linux guys argue about which distribution of Linux and which file system to use and which GPL.....before they can come around to answering your question.

Yeah the arguing doesn't bother me, its interesting at the least. I understand I have to mount the drives, i have googled how to do this, but it does not seem to be working. It says I have to specify the filesystem type, but ntfs doesn't seem to work in that instance.

 

[coolred]

Originally posted by: cleverhandle

Originally posted by: coolred
Okay, but how do I go about copying the data from one drive to the next. Linux only sees the drive that it is installed on, so what do I need to do to back up the data?

Mount the NTFS partition read-only under Linux:

mount -t ntfs -o ro /dev/hdb1 /mnt

where hdb = your old disk (look in your dmesg output if you're not sure what it is), 1 = the partition on that disk (probably 1), and /mnt is an empty, temporary mountpoint (which /mnt is by default on most distros).

Figure out where you want to keep your data on the new disk and make a directory for it:

mkdir /new/data/path

Then, if you want to copy the entire disk, do

cp -a /mnt/* /new/data/path

Of if you only want a specific folder...

cp -a /mnt/my/data/folder /new/data/path

Either way, the data will probably end up readable only by root, so you'll want to change the ownership and permissions to something that makes sense for you.

find /new/data/path -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find /new/data/path -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
chown -R myusername.mygroupname /new/data/path

Unmount the drive and you're done...

umount /mnt

Unknown filesystem ntfs is the error I get

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: coolred
Unknown filesystem ntfs is the error I get

If this is a Fedora system, they don't ship with the required kernel module. Get the kmod-ntfs RPM that's appropriate for your kernel (probably i686) from here. If you've already configured yum to use rpm.livna.org, then you can just use yum instead. Otherwise...

Install it with...

rpm -ivh kmod-ntfs-blahblahblah.rpm

Load the kernel module:

modprobe ntfs

Then it should work...

 

[coolred]

That still gives me the same error

 

[cleverhandle]

Print the exact text of the error you receive. Also print the exact output of lsmod.

edit: eh... lsmod is going to give a lot of output. Just check to see if "ntfs" comes up in there.

 

[coolred]

unknown filesystem type 'ntfs'
is the exact error I get

And no I do not see NTFS listed when running lsmod

Maybe I installed that rpm wrong. I think I have yum setup for livna.org. I wne there and downloaded the rpm you told me to, then installed it. Was I also supposed to do the modprobe ntfs, or is that just for the manual install?

 

[cleverhandle]

You still need to modprobe. Sorry, I was unclear.