Topic: e-smith and fat32

[john]

Hi all.

I was just wondering, is it possible/feasable to install e-smith/SME server on the fat32 filesystem?

my situation: We use solidworks at work, and between horrible SW file bloat and MSVB, the files get HUGE!! i found a program called Unfrag over at zdnet which greatly gets rid of the bloat in the files and returns a lot of disk space. (this is not a typical *defrag* program; it only affects files blown up by msvb. don't ask me for details tho; i dont know :-/)

anyway, i don't think unfrag will work if the files are on an ext2 filesystem. i would like to use e-smith as the file server, but am concerned about disk space (currently 9G, and filling up fast).

e-smith reformats everything when it installs.

is there some way to install it on fat32, or install drives along side e-smith?

any help here is appreciated.

thanks,
john
(who finally found the time to set up e-smith at home. damn that was easy.)  

[Dan Brown]

I'm pretty sure that the kernel shipped with e-smith/SME supports fat32, but there are _major_ limitations with using it (aside from the hopefully-obvious fact that it would be completely unsupported).  The biggest problem is that fat32 has no concept of ownership or permissions, so you'd have no way to implement any kind of access control on that drive/partition.

A second problem is that unfrag presumably doesn't run under Linux, so you couldn't run it on the e-smith server directly.  If it is filesystem-specific, there's no way it would run over a network.  To get it to work, you'd have to swap out the drive occasionally, which doesn't seem like a good solution to me.  If it would work over the network, then it almost certainly doesn't care about the filesystem.

[dane]

We run Solidworks here also, the only thing that I could do to keep the file size from getting out of control, was to run a fileserver under Win2000 with a NTFS fat system.  We then just simply store it compressed using Windows 2000 attributes settings.  It's a little slow, but when your dealing with GBs of part and assembly files, you can deal with the speed.

A friend of mine, though, swears he got a disk to run on a Linux server that was formatted with NTFS.  Check this out:  http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~loewis/ntfs/  It may help you out a bit.

dane

[john]

hi.

thanks guys.

after some more discussion with the comp.cad.solidworks people, it turns out that Unfrag modifies the files directly, and it doesn't matter what the filesystem is. People are running the program on a win box on files on sun unix servers.

so i dont need fat32 for soidworks files.

thanks,
john

[john]

Dane,

btw, you might want to try Unfrag from the zdnet web site. ifyou can't find it let me know and i can email it to you. it's pretty small.

i run it every night just after doing a tape backup.

the first time i ran it, i recovered several hundred megs of drive space.

--john