I'm trying to decide what filesystem to use on a USB drive. I'd like to be
able to access the unit from OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, and perhaps Windows.

What is the intersection of the sets of filesystems supported by these
various OS's?

-- 
I'm sorry, no one here has any intentions of helping you with anything. 
I am the manager of all of Customer Service."

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FAT32.


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And everyone can be compiled to read NTFS; Linux can even write to it.

Best
   Martin

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On Mon, 3 Sep 2007 18:17:44 +0200

FreeBSD can also write NTFS using the ntfs-3g driver together with
fusefs.


Jona

--
"I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists
build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns
laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and tell you that you
are free." Eris, Goddess Of Chaos, Discord & Confusion

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Actually, this is tenative at best. Though some have had success both 
reading from and writing to various NTFS versions, it's not really a 
safe thing to do. It's still an undocumented file system, and many 
typical operations fail disastrously. This week I wasted two different 
XP installations by attempting to resize the NTFS partition (shrink) 
with two different open source tools (PartitionLogic and GParted).

(mumble mumble mumble about the crap friends ask me to do on an os that 
I don't run.)

jcr

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On Thu, 6 Sep 2007 07:11:47 -0700

I never really used it, I think I just tested it once.
On their site they say: "The driver is in STABLE status since February
2007, after twelve years of development" so I thought it was ok.
I had some terrible crashes with sshfs on FreeBSD. I think the FreeBSD
fuse kernel module is a bit flaky. I never tried it on Linux.

Best regards,
Jona

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How stable a driver is doesn't indicate the actual level of success
writing {safely,properly,sanely} to a problematic filesystem.like
NTFS. It may successfully corrupt data without crashing or throwing
errors at all.

DS

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Once Windows is in the picture, you will need to go with a Microsoft
file system.  Most of these drives anyway come preformatted as FAT32,
so it's quite possible you don't even have to make an active choice.

On the other hand, on some units long filenames ended up with MS-DOS
style 8.3 file names until I recreated the file system on them (newfs
-t msdos).  Fortunately my new 4GB unit did not have that problem.

-- 
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team
http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ http://www.datadok.no/ http://www.nuug.no/
"Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic"
delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.

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Also, it's worth noting that Vista and I think XP SP2 won't create a 
FAT32 partition above 32gb.  If you create a >32gb partition with other 
tools the large partition will work just fine under Windows though.

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Also you can use ext2(3) filesystem for this purpose: BSD works quite
OK with it (though with no journal support), Linux - ow, do you think
it's not?:) - and there are some tools in the Internet to be able to
read ext2 from Windows. Don't know about writing: you need to
investigate it by yourself.

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Salut,


The same goes for ffs/ufs

				Tonnerre

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Ow, please provide me with the link to Windows UFS software. I'll be
glad to see it by myself.

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On Mon, 3 Sep 2007 16:10:52 +0300

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ffsdrv/


-- 
"I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists
build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns
laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and tell you that you
are free." Eris, Goddess Of Chaos, Discord & Confusion

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But linux is not abble to write to ufs/ffs file system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Fast_File_System#Implementations
I think fat32 is a good choice: you have nothing to install.

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Salut,


Did you ever have to debug a deep directory structure where something
caused all directory to become files? On a 500G disk? Fun.

				Tonnerre

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Ho so I'm not the only one :)



-- 
Julien Cabillot

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I would suggest that the OP be very specific with what is needed.  What
size of filesystem?  Which operating systems need to read only and which
to read and write.  Given how flexible Linux and OBSD are, I would guess
that the limit will be what can windows do.  I don't know since I only
used windows 3.1 for some games when I wasn't running OS/2.  For 7 years
its been Debian and now I'm transitioning to OBSD.  I never have to
interoperate with windows users.

Doug.

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OK, let's eliminate Windows from the requiremant. Now we have OpenBSD,
Linux, and FreeBSD in order of importance. All 3 need read/write access. I
will be using this to move data, and I want to be able to keep various
places in sync, using rsync. So modification date, and file name retention
are important.

Where does that lead us?

-- 
I'm sorry, no one here has any intentions of helping you with anything. 
I am the manager of all of Customer Service."

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Hi!


For me, ext2 works fine, on a USB hard drive.

Initialized it under OpenBSD:

First partitioned it into 2 primary partitions, one OpenBSD, one ext2.

Edited the disklabel accordingly (have the ext2 on slice i). newfs'ed (a
as ffs, mostly for backup purposes for OpenBSD boxen only, i.e. no
respect for other OS's needs; i as ext2, using mke2fs from the e2fsprogs
port/package).

At least on OpenBSD and on Linux it has worked fine up to now, both
reading and writing on both platforms.

Kind regards,

Hannah.

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No I didn't. Is it so fun? :)
I didn't say fat32 is a good FS but IMHO it's a FS with less constraints
than other ones. Imagine your network is down or you don't remember the
name of the driver and you need to access to the data stored on a FFS
disk from a new win box. I would say it's also fun :)
To avoid this problem, you can create a small fat partition, store all
the drivers (ext, ufs, ...) on it, and create multiple ufs/ext/..
partitions to prevent huge data loss.
But it depends on the use you will have of your disk.

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Salut,


Oh yes. By the way, I must say that for additional fun, the directory
names were A, B, C, ..., Y, Z. Gives you quite something to search for.

				Tonnerre

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By the way, if you want to use OpenBSD to format a USB drive as FAT32, 
then edit the MBR partition table as described at

 http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118379731620389
 
and run newfs_msdos

 # newfs_msdos -F 32 -u 63 /dev/rsd0i

(note, this line assumes that the drive is device sd0)

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There do exist ext2fs drivers for Windows; obviously anything which
boots the kernel, Linux, can read and write ext2fs. There may well exist
UFS drivers for Windows but I haven't looked. (I only use OpenBSD on my
firewall/router.)

If you can live with the limitations of FAT32, then you may want to use
that; fragmentation really isn't as much of an issue if it's a solid
state device (you don't say). I personally find it ludicrous not to be
able to use a filename on a Unix-like OS that wasn't legal in Microsoft
MS-DOS 1.0 (e.g. filenames with colons).

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn@speakeasy.net>

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I think that the best choice is FAT32 it will works out-of-the-box on
all systems
a usb stick isn't a device that must have some performance IMHO



-- 
. ``   Registered Linux user #388877 and Machine #289399
  `-   WebMaster http://www.ls-lug.org

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