[nzlug] 500GB USB External HDD Question

[Andrew Bruce]

OK, so I took the plunge and bought one.  After connecting it to my 
server, and some initial mucking around to sort out the correct group 
settings and umask settings, I've got it working the way I want (in this 
respect).

Since this is connected to my server, I would like to provide a way for 
my other flatmates to connect to it.  One exclusively uses Windows, the 
other exclusive Linux.  I'm personally between both (more Linux than 
anything), but have to use Windows for school.

I've had a go at getting Samba to work, but of course this brings its 
own problem.

I've mounted the drive up at /mnt/mybook500, and can get the share 
working fine (along with all the others I've got).  Users can connect 
and do whatever they need.  The problem comes if I need to unmount the 
USB drive from the server to take away for any reason.  It tells me the 
drive is in use (which it is, as Samba is sharing it over the network).

Disconnecting the drive at this point means stopping Samba, unmounting 
the drive, and restarting Samba.

Is there any way around this?  Preferably some way that makes sure that 
the drive isn't being written to by Samba, and then cleanly unmounts it. 

As part of this, when the drive isn't mounted, I would like some way of 
ensuring that the /mnt/mybook500 folder can't be written to by (dumb) 
network users, as I'm guessing it will still be being shared, even 
though the volume isn't technically there.

Can anyone help with this - so far Google hasn't been much help.

Thanks,

Andrew

Andrew Bruce wrote:
> I'm probably going to be picking one of these up in the next few days, 
> but first I wanted to ask a couple of quick questions.
>
> For the required purposes of this drive, I need to leave it as one 
> single large partition.  Because of this, and the fact that it will 
> frequently be going between Windows and Linux (the Windows machines I 
> won't have control over, therefore I can't use a utility to access an 
> ext filesystem) I'm wondering whether it's possible to even format it 
> as one large FAT32 partition, or if I would be best looking at NTFS 
> combined with NTFS-3G for Linux.
>
> Has anyone had any success on using the NTFS-3G program, and would it 
> be recommended for day to day use?  Or alternatively does FAT32 
> support drives this large (I think FAT32 is good for 2TB?) and more 
> importantly, if I do use FAT32 will I have any problems mounting the 
> volume in Windows (I remember reading something about  Windows 
> starting to be a bit picky about what it can and can't do with the FAT 
> filesystem these days, whereas I don't envisage having any problems 
> with Linux).
>
> Thanks for any help,
>
> Andrew Bruce
>
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