LBA48 and linux file serving... how much trouble?

[blakerwry]

I was planning on taking my AK32 w/ Duron 750 and making it into a linux file serrving box for my apartment... I was thinking I'd use an existing drive for the OS and then a 160-200GB drive (or two) for storage. Then serve up the files using SAMBA.

How much of a headache is this going to be?

I believe that LBA48 has been included in kernels 2.4.20 and up so the newest distro of Mandrake, slackware, or redhat should all handle a >120GB drive...

The motherboard has the VIA 8233 southbridge sporting a blazing ata-100 interface . But the BIOS update introduced on 03/07/2002 states that the motherboard should "Support HDD larger then 137GB capacity" (got to love Shuttle's command of the English language).

And of course any HDD I purchase is going to be LBA48 compatible... I was planning on getting Maxtor DM+9 P-ATA drives because of low prices w/ rebates and low idle noise.

So as far as I can tell things should work... but do you guys expect any problems? What file system would work best in this senerio? I assume S-ATA is out of the question as even most windows drivers for S-ATA controllers seem prety much in the beta stages, I'd assume linux drivers are about in the "alpha" stages.

 

[blakerwry]

just to let you guys know where I stand, I have moderate experience with mandrake and redhat and have been using SAMBA to serve files on my LAN for about 6 months to 1 year now.

I'm no stranger to any of this except LBA48.

 

[Mercutio]

With RedHat 7.x (I think I had 7.3) and RH8 I've had no problems with ext2/3 and 160GB drives.

There's a patch - akin to drive overlay software - to allow LBA48 drives on hardware that doesn't natively support it. My understanding is that it can cause data corruption.

But if your hardware is LBA48-native, no problem.

 

[Mercutio]

With RedHat 7.x (I think I had 7.3) and RH8 I've had no problems with ext2/3 and 160GB drives.

There's a patch - akin to drive overlay software - to allow LBA48 drives on hardware that doesn't natively support it. My understanding is that it can cause data corruption.

But if your hardware is LBA48-native, no problem.

 

[blakerwry]

Merc, have you had any problem using >2GB files over windows shares?

I was trying to perform a backup of my mandrake box using tar and gzip over a windows share to my winXP box.

I mounted the share using smbmount without a hitch, but when I went to make the backup to the share I found out that the backup would only complete to 2GB in size... the resultant file was corrupted.

I've finished the backup now(by deleting some files and backing up to local disk and then transfering), but I am interested in why this occured. Was this something with the way I mounted the share, something with winXP's SMB file sharing, or a limitation of SMB itself? I am using ext3 on the mandrake box and NTFS on the winXP box.

 

[blakerwry]

crud, i installed debian, only to realize that it was 2.2.20 and not 2.4.20


It didn't run well out of the box, i had to spend about a half hour manually editing the X config file to get X-windows running. Then I spent an hour or so trying to get my mouse to work well with my KVM when switching between boxes... not to mention a bunch of other little things I've setup and configureed... and now, I find out that I have an old kernel that doesn't support LBA48...

I haven't recieved the drive yet, just testing out the different distros... I'm glad I learned some things and am more comfortable with command line editing of the important config files, but I hate to feel that most the time was wasted.

oh well, off to a new version


*btw, I really like apt-get... very nice tool. (when it works)

 

[blakerwry]

oh, yeah... What is recomended as a good file system for a large drive? ext3 seems like the standard, but ReiserFS and XFS seem to be popular choices as well. Anybody know anything about these?

 

[Mercutio]

From anecdotal posts on /. from people who usually know what they're talking about, ReiserFS has a couple of scenarios where it will absolutely sh!t itself and kill your filesystem, and that the developers acknowledge those problems with no immediate plans for fixing them.

I can also say that ReiserFS is subjectively faster than ext3 using similar OS/hardware, or at least that it was about 8 months ago, the last time I had a machine running with ReiserFS on it.

Sheer laziness moved my Linux boxes to ext3 as I've rebuilt them.

 

[blakerwry]

i just installed slackware... I'm liking some things.. others, not so much...

I liked how in mandrake I could useradd and it would give the user a home dir, tmp, and trash very easily... in slack it just adds the user... in debian it prompts me for all kinds of information about the user.. but atleast it gives them a home dir... (maybe I'm confusing adduser and useradd, but I thought in mandrake they were the same simple interface)

the install was easy enough, but took a long time in the package selection mode I used... wished I had had enough free space just to choose the "full" for now.

I also didn't like how slack couldn't detect my nic, i had to manually specify natsemi, no big deal since I knew the chip.. but otherwise would have been a pain. Oh, slack also didn't detect my TNT vid card, so I had to edit the XF86 config by hand again...

atleast I didn't have to manually modify runlevels like in debian (why does a runlevel of 2 in debian start X automatically?)


btw, what's the easiset way to change default windows managers when you startX?

 

[Mercutio]

Most distributions have shell scripts to change your window manager.