3 ms·

FWIW, I've been running Linux since 1993 or 94, and have never felt a need for this filesystem. Compatibility with other UNIX systems always meant FTP or NFS an

by dsr_ 4y ago

FWIW, I've been running Linux since 1993 or 94, and have never felt a need for this filesystem. Compatibility with other UNIX systems always meant FTP or NFS and then application support for whatever file formats were in use.

rbanffy 4y ago
I understand it'd be more important early on (as in "1990's"), but things like NFS abstracted away the underlying filesystem (at least where the machine that has the disk is alive). I mentioned the historical preservation aspect, and, following a comment, I'd say it belongs more under FUSE than inside the mainline kernel.
- smegsicle 4y ago
  > NFS belongs more under FUSE besides any philosophical argument, doesn't it still crap up your whole system whenever the network flakes out? (unlike, i imagine, any FUSE driver)
  - guenthert 4y ago
    Not sure what you might mean by 'crap out'. If you have soft-mounted a remote export and the network goes away, then your applications experience i/o errors which they either handle one way or another or not, which yields silent data corruption, but you have been warned about that. If you have hard-mount'ed an remote export and the network connection to that server goes dark, then any access to files residing on that will stall ('hang') until the network issue is resolved. What exactly do you want the client to do, when it relies on remote resources and the network isn't reliable? This fortunately is these days much less a problem than in the days of cheapernet (10BASE2).
  - kasabali 4y ago
    > unlike, i imagine, any FUSE driver FUSE drivers aren't exempt from hanging syscalls, I've experienced them even with local mounts let alone network ones. I don't know why people keep repeating this.
cduzz 4y ago
Antiquated unixes weren't always connectivity monsters -- some POS with a bunch of serial ports for instance. FTP and NFS are good, I'd also want ckermit / tip / tar in my toolbag... Probably not an issue these decades, though.
- mattpallissard 4y ago
  Eh, FTP's port requirements are pretty onerous in today's NAT based world we live in.
kjs3 4y ago
I used it all the time in the 90s and early 2000s to mount disk created on System V based systems, most notably SCO Unix, which was very popular at the time. Links were slow, NFS was sorta unreliable and had limitations, and FTP doesn't preserve filesystem attributes among other issues, and some use cases just require the actual filesystem, so it was often easier just to move/send a physical disk. I think I've even used it in the last 5 years to do some data recovery on an old SVR4 system for a friend. I won't be sad if it goes away, tho...these days I'd probably just image the disk and mount it on a VM running SCO or older Linux or some such. Time marches on...
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  Same. I used it periodically to recover data from expired hardware. Kids today don't have any idea that you couldn't just take a drive from an installed sco system and just boot it up on any other motherboard and hard drive controller. (well, there are wizard incantations that you won't know and won't be able to figure out in time) So couldn't boot the old system on the old dead hardware or on new hardware, couldn't buy a new copy of the old hardware... but you could mount the disk and get everything that matters. A fuse implementation would be good enough today though. You're not doing actual production work on htfs today no matter how special the circumstances. ...and did anyone ever automate parsing the divvy partition table?
  - kjs3 4y ago
    You're not doing actual production work on htfs today no matter how special the circumstances. Someone is, apparently. Some shop called Xinuos apparently bought part of the corpse (the not lawsuit obsessed, not fraud committing part, presumably) and is still selling SCO OpenServer and Unixware. That's some serious dead-ender computing. But hey...people still run OS/2 in production. Divvy...haven't thought about that in not long enough.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    Imagine telling them we could boot the machine from a SCSI tape…

by dsr_ 4y ago

rbanffy 4y ago

I understand it'd be more important early on (as in "1990's"), but things like NFS abstracted away the underlying filesystem (at least where the machine that has the disk is alive). I mentioned the historical preservation aspect, and, following a comment, I'd say it belongs more under FUSE than inside the mainline kernel.

smegsicle 4y ago
> NFS belongs more under FUSE besides any philosophical argument, doesn't it still crap up your whole system whenever the network flakes out? (unlike, i imagine, any FUSE driver)
- guenthert 4y ago
  Not sure what you might mean by 'crap out'. If you have soft-mounted a remote export and the network goes away, then your applications experience i/o errors which they either handle one way or another or not, which yields silent data corruption, but you have been warned about that. If you have hard-mount'ed an remote export and the network connection to that server goes dark, then any access to files residing on that will stall ('hang') until the network issue is resolved. What exactly do you want the client to do, when it relies on remote resources and the network isn't reliable? This fortunately is these days much less a problem than in the days of cheapernet (10BASE2).
- kasabali 4y ago
  > unlike, i imagine, any FUSE driver FUSE drivers aren't exempt from hanging syscalls, I've experienced them even with local mounts let alone network ones. I don't know why people keep repeating this.

cduzz 4y ago

Antiquated unixes weren't always connectivity monsters -- some POS with a bunch of serial ports for instance. FTP and NFS are good, I'd also want ckermit / tip / tar in my toolbag... Probably not an issue these decades, though.

mattpallissard 4y ago
Eh, FTP's port requirements are pretty onerous in today's NAT based world we live in.

kjs3 4y ago

I used it all the time in the 90s and early 2000s to mount disk created on System V based systems, most notably SCO Unix, which was very popular at the time. Links were slow, NFS was sorta unreliable and had limitations, and FTP doesn't preserve filesystem attributes among other issues, and some use cases just require the actual filesystem, so it was often easier just to move/send a physical disk. I think I've even used it in the last 5 years to do some data recovery on an old SVR4 system for a friend. I won't be sad if it goes away, tho...these days I'd probably just image the disk and mount it on a VM running SCO or older Linux or some such. Time marches on...

Brian_K_White 4y ago
Same. I used it periodically to recover data from expired hardware. Kids today don't have any idea that you couldn't just take a drive from an installed sco system and just boot it up on any other motherboard and hard drive controller. (well, there are wizard incantations that you won't know and won't be able to figure out in time) So couldn't boot the old system on the old dead hardware or on new hardware, couldn't buy a new copy of the old hardware... but you could mount the disk and get everything that matters. A fuse implementation would be good enough today though. You're not doing actual production work on htfs today no matter how special the circumstances. ...and did anyone ever automate parsing the divvy partition table?
- kjs3 4y ago
  You're not doing actual production work on htfs today no matter how special the circumstances. Someone is, apparently. Some shop called Xinuos apparently bought part of the corpse (the not lawsuit obsessed, not fraud committing part, presumably) and is still selling SCO OpenServer and Unixware. That's some serious dead-ender computing. But hey...people still run OS/2 in production. Divvy...haven't thought about that in not long enough.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  Imagine telling them we could boot the machine from a SCSI tape…