XceptN’s IT Blog

This is basically done by two methods:
– The NTFS kernel module
– The NTFS user space programs
from the kernel source or http://www.linux-ntfs.org/

The NTFS Kernel Module
Have a check at the wiki page

You
might find an appropriate prebuilt driver for your current kernel
version. Then you can do normal mounts etc on NTFS partitions. One
problem here is that if you upgrade your kernel, you’ll need to have a
new kernel module. Or eventually build from source.

Alternatively
with 2.6 kernels there is the NTFS support. But with enterprise distros
(like OEL or RHEL) that support is not compiled in and rebuilt kernels
are not supported.

The NTFS Userspace Programs

That is the kernel-version-free solution and it is quite effective. One can get the source from Linux-NTFS Download or more precisely the 2.0.0 version here.

This is the option that I prefer…

Note
that there is an option to have ntfsmount too (–enable-ntfsmount) ..
But that requires FUSE support where enterprise distros generally
discard / disable FUSE support due to security reasons.

# tar jxvf ntfsprogs-2.0.0.tar.bz2
ntfsprogs-2.0.0/
ntfsprogs-2.0.0/doc/
ntfsprogs-2.0.0/doc/attributes.txt
ntfsprogs-2.0.0/doc/CodingStyle
…
ntfsprogs-2.0.0/COPYING
ntfsprogs-2.0.0/TODO.ntfsprogs
ntfsprogs-2.0.0/CREDITS
ntfsprogs-2.0.0/ntfsprogs.spec
# cd ntfsprogs-2.0.0
# ./configure
checking build system type… i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking host system type… i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking target system type… i686-pc-linux-gnu
…
config.status: config.h is unchanged
config.status: executing depfiles commands
# make && make install
make all-recursive
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/oyuksel/projects/ntfsprogs-2.0.0′
…
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/oyuksel/projects/ntfsprogs-2.0.0′
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/oyuksel/projects/ntfsprogs-2.0.0′
# export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib
# ntfsls -l /dev/sdb2
0 May 31 15:23 2008 data
0 Feb 12 15:59 2007 data1
0 Feb 12 15:59 2007 data2
0 Mar 30 15:43 2007 muzik
0 Feb 13 15:21 2007 MyVM
0 Feb 13 15:59 2007 RECYCLER
0 Feb 4 23:14 2007 System Volume Information
42004 Jul 28 16:13 2008 testfile
# ntfscat /dev/sdb2 testfile > testfile
# ls -l testfile
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 42004 Jul 28 16:15 testfile

For more information see Linux-NTFS Wiki

Found and used dvd95 and that works quite nice with gnome – also with kde .. But has problems with some dvds..
Testing k9copy. That is exclusively for KDE .. But EL and fedora does it nicely along.

Has
tested k9copy .. That is nice too .. But did not solve the some-dvd
issues .. It seems now I have managed to get dvd95 right along with
fedora 9 .

udev is introduced with the 2.6 kernel (ie not available in RHEL3 and before)
And that is solely for device name persistence. It is mainly a problem when
disks are external / via HBA, and the names across reboots and/or clusters might
not be the same.

We have been using devlabel to be able to get some persistence with RHEL3 and
RHAS 2.1 but it was not the best solution.

What udev does is that based on the specific attributes of a device (especially
UUID – scsi_id) creates a persistently named symbolic link to a device which can
come up with different /dev/sd* names. udev is also crucial for multipathing
too.

That is for disks.. udev can also be used for RH cluster dlm, hotplugging, sane
(scanners), network, pcmcia, tablets, sound (alsa), pam (biometric interfaces),
bluetooth and some xen.. So udev is way generic.

Note that with EL5, the defaults are available under /dev/disk via
by-id by-label by-path by-uuid
directories.

For raw devices, (raw interface) that was devised to provide character devices
mapped on block devices. Traditionally on UNIX the disks are introduced in
character (raw) mode and they have sequential mode. But for mounts we need block
devices. With linux, it was implemented the other way around. Basically the
block devices are available for disks, and when databases needed raw
devices for multinode access (clustering) and async I/O (2.1 times – when
async I/O was not possible with ext2) it was implemented as a mapping
mechanism.

Nowadays we do not use the raw interface as RDBMSes support the use of
block devices as raw and we have cluster filesystems (OCFS2).
. And the raw support via the “raw” interface is deprecated with RHEL5
(although it is available) and not likely be around for EL6.

Say we have a LVM’ed /dev/sdd1 and we have to mount logical volume LogVol00 in it..

# file -s /dev/sdd1

/dev/sdd1: LVM2 (Linux Logical Volume Manager) , UUID: 7zKduhTHsMa3YD3t2gocYKUDGRP5QvW

# vgscan
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while…
Found volume group “VolGroup00” using metadata type lvm2

# vgchange -a y VolGroup00
2 logical volume(s) in volume group “VolGroup00” now active

# lvdisplay
— Logical volume —
LV Name /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
VG Name VolGroup00
LV UUID YcNYud-4BXO-Ro6N-P7VW-yrLm-DDZT-oLGgAO
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 0
LV Size 1.94 GB
Current LE 62
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors 0
Block device 253:2

— Logical volume —
LV Name /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01
VG Name VolGroup00
LV UUID pSyXMZ-8TXw-fwiw-m3re-Oi3I-0fch-mJ1Q5H
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 0
LV Size 1.91 GB
Current LE 61
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors 0
Block device 253:3
# mkdir -p /mnt/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# ls /mnt/VolGroup00/LogVol00
bin dev home lib lost+found misc opt root selinux sys usr
boot etc initrd lib64 media mnt proc sbin srv tmp var
#

dd if=/dev/sdX of=/tmp/sda-mbr.bin bs=512 count=1