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Filesystem for Windows, OS X, and Linux
MengerSponge
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Registered User regular
I'll be graduating college in a couple months, and the plan is to move in with my friend (who's already graduated), as we'll both be working in the same city. He uses mostly Windows XP, but has a MacBook that gets occasional use. I'm on an iBook, but will be building a new computer and running Windows XP (for games) and Linux (for everything else).
What we want to do is make one computer to hold tons of music, videos, etc., and just connect that to the home network and use it to dump stuff on/stream stuff off of (we won't be installing programs to that machine for other computers to use, it's just a file server). The problem, obviously, is that it has to be accessible (readable and writeable) from Windows, OS X, and Linux. We don't really care what OS is on that computer, how the hard drive(s) is/are formatted, etc., we just want something that every other computer in the house will be able to see and use simultaneously. In my limited searching, it seems that every filesystem out there only works on one, maybe two of those OS's. NTFS isn't so good on OS X or Linux (I think it's only readable), I have no idea if ext3 works well on Windows or OS X, etc.
So, what's a good filesystem to use for this kind of machine? Is there anything that will be accessible from all of the big three? Any OS suggestions?
What we want to do is make one computer to hold tons of music, videos, etc., and just connect that to the home network and use it to dump stuff on/stream stuff off of (we won't be installing programs to that machine for other computers to use, it's just a file server). The problem, obviously, is that it has to be accessible (readable and writeable) from Windows, OS X, and Linux. We don't really care what OS is on that computer, how the hard drive(s) is/are formatted, etc., we just want something that every other computer in the house will be able to see and use simultaneously. In my limited searching, it seems that every filesystem out there only works on one, maybe two of those OS's. NTFS isn't so good on OS X or Linux (I think it's only readable), I have no idea if ext3 works well on Windows or OS X, etc.
So, what's a good filesystem to use for this kind of machine? Is there anything that will be accessible from all of the big three? Any OS suggestions?
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Set that up on an old computer, pop in a bunch of hard drives, format them UFS, and you'll be golden. I have it set up with a Macbook, WinXP comp, and linux comp all accessing it fine. I love it.
Was there anything additional that you had to install on any of the computers accessing the server, or is everything built right into each respective OS?
The hard drives are tossed together to a giant file system with LVM.
Nope. It shows up in a workgroup in my mac's Network folder, you click it and authenticate (if you set a password) and it mounts the drive. I have the pass remembered, so now it's easy as pie. You can even set up aliases on your mac that will autoconnect to the network drive when clicked (ie. movie aliases can be put in movies directory on a mac and work in frontrow :-D) On the windows box, it'll show up in the network places like any other shared drive. You can also set it up to do FTP (i have that too since it seems faster for large files), and a whole slew of other methods. Flawless victory.