[PLUG] Network storage

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:14:27 -0800
"Larry Brigman" <larry.brigman at gmail.com> dijo:

> On 1/16/07, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> > On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:09:47 -0800
> > "William A Morita" <wamorita at hevanet.com> dijo:

> > > Here is another possibility:
> > > Convert the Win2K FS to FAT32 (vfat) and load Linux on it as a dual boot.
> > > When you power up your Win2K system booted to Linux you can fsync directly
> > > into the Win2K partition.

> > I'd consider that if I had not finally figured out how to mount the USB drive. Now that I have I can read/write to it from the command line, even if it is hanging on a Windows 2000 computer. So there is no need to install Linux on the Windows 2000 desktop computer.
> >
> > Right now all I need to do (I think) is figure out how to fix my rsync command. At this time it is:
> >
> > sudo rsync -av --delete --exclude=/proc --exclude=/media / /media/smb/laptop
> >
> > It copies the files to the /laptop folder on the USB drive -- Windows 2000 sees them there, so I know they are really there, not just copied to the mount point. (Why does Nautilus not indicate whether you are looking at files on the mount point or files on the actual disk?) But in copying the files I get a ton of error messages, mostly relating to mknod and symlink, all of which end in "Operation not permitted (1)." According to man rsync, "(1)" indicates a syntax error. But that doesn't make sense if the error is "Operation not permitted."

> Because mknod and ln command are not supported on the windows box but rsync
> doesn't know what the other end can do until it tries it.

Ah. And I have since discovered errors with chown, no doubt the same
issue.

So that means that I can rsync the files to the USB disk hanging on the
Windows 2000 desktop, but it will never be a real mirror of my Ubuntu
laptop because links, ownerships and such cannot be transferred with
the files. 

So to get a real mirror the filesystem on the USB drive would have to
be ext3 or something Linuxy, right? Of course, Windows wouldn't see it.
So maybe I'd better revisit Bill's suggestion above. Except I'd really
rather not mess with the Windows desktop. 

I'd rather just shut down the Windows desktop except when I need it --
a couple times a month. And for backup, maybe I should just build a new
bare-bones Linux desktop that I can leave turned off also, except when
I want to back up the laptop. Or go back to the original idea of
getting a network drive, then sell off the USB drive.

Oh, and I decided to go ahead and rsync the laptop from / to the USB
disk on the Windows desktop, in spite of not having permissions and
ownerships. The laptop has about 30 GB on it. Rsync got
to /lib/libc-2.3.6.so and locked up the laptop with the CPU racing at
high speed. I'm guessing it copied about half the 30 GB. There's no
easy way to tell what caused this. There's enough flaky hardware on
this Compaq laptop that it could easily be a hardware issue. Or a bug
in Dapper amd-64 somewhere. <sigh>