Viraj's Weblog

I have an old Thinkpad laptop. Since the new Ubuntu 7.04 came out, I wanted to try it out. The laptop is pretty much useless as a desktop with 192M RAM, but I've been hearing good things about the server version of Ubuntu and decided to give it a whirl. Now I have a laptop server that I use for simple things like an SSH gateway for me to connect externally.

Ubuntu server is pretty nice, but as with typical Debian distros, is rather bare bones. I had to do alot of package downloading to get to a useable system. What do I think of Ubuntu as a server? Well I'm used to Redhat, and I've griped about Debian in the past, namely update-rc.d. The same problems I mentioned in that blog in 2005 still exist today. Searching around I found that 'rcconf' is another useful tool. Why not install that by default then?

I also have major gripes with the dbconfig stuff. This is an effort to make database configuration package-friendly. It works, at least until you start removing packages and trying to reinstall them. I understand the reasoning for it, but it is just more pain than necessary. It's very easy to screw up the configuration completely.

Anyway, once I got things setup, I liked it. Next up was trying to mount some filesystems on my Mac Mini. I installed netatalk, but soon realized this was for the opposite: to share linux filesystems to a mac. This page indicates that the afpfs filesystem module, which I needed, is unmaintained. Next I found afpfs-ng, which is a fuse module. That sounds great and all, but no matter what I did I could not get it to authenticate properly with my mac.

I decided to ditch AFP and setup my mac to export shares via Samba. It's tried and true and mounts on Linux flawlessly. But I had a few shares to mount, all containing multimedia stuff. Now comes the cool part: unionfs.

On my mac I have 2 directories with movies, one on an internal drive and one on an external. I shared them out and mounted them on Linux, with something like this in /etc/fstab (using \ as line continuation below):

//192.168.1.100/valankar /mnt/mini smbfs \
 credentials=/home/valankar/.smbcredentials, \
 uid=valankar,gid=valankar,fmask=600,dmask=700 \
 0 0
//192.168.1.100/stuff /mnt/stuff smbfs \
 credentials=/home/valankar/.smbcredentials, \
 uid=valankar,gid=valankar,fmask=600,dmask=700 \
 0 0

The credentials file is so I don't have to include my password in the world-readable /etc/fstab. So this is great, but what I'd really like to do is combine /mnt/stuff and /mnt/mini in to one virtual directory. After installing the unionfs-tools package, I added to fstab:

unionfs /mnt/movies unionfs \
 dirs=/mnt/mini/Downloads:/mnt/stuff/Movies \
 0 0

Now when I go to /mnt/movies and do 'ls', I see a combination of both directories. This is just so cool. When I write to the directory, the 1st real directory gets priority, but I thought, this would actually be a very cool filesystem if the writes were put on the drive with the most free space. There would need to be some coordination when making directories, but this could essentially let me mount many different types of drives and even disparate filesystems, and then combine them into one writable virtual filesystem.

Turns out there is one such experimental filesystem called SwitchFS. I'm not sure how active this project is but I might give it a whirl. I've been itching for some open source stuff to work on.