Need to share SAN-attached disk across solaris and linux, need common fs
807567Jul 21 2004 — edited Aug 11 2004I have a Solaris 8 backup server and a farm of multiple linux servers hosting large files that I need to back up. Rather than doing network backups I am looking into the option of using a SAN-attached disk formatted with a common filesystem so that it can be mounted on a linux node, have data dumped to it, unmounted and then mounted on the backup server as a local file system for backup to tape.
Provideed that I am careful to umount the file system at both ends before remounting it, this should work just fine and anyway any corruption will be more an annoyance than a problem.
Unfortunately, I have so far been unable to locate a file system which both OS'es support.
First I tried using the experimental UFS support in the linux kernel, but evidently the write support is so broken that the UFS volume becomes corrupt instantly (this is the 2.4.9 kernel and I cannot upgrade to a newer working kernel).
Plan B was to use the ext2fs driver for solaris to achieve the same - I only need read support on the backup server. This too failed, and actually caused a kernel panic and an instant reboot. I used the Solaris8 sources from ftp://sun.drydog.com/pub/solaris/, and compiled them using sun's own CC and make. I suspect that they only really work from IA32 systems while I am on a Sparc (SunFire 240).
Plan C then became to use a FAT32 partition which is writable from linux and ought to be mountable in solaris using the pcfs driver. Or so I thought. This too fails completely; mount doesn't find any fat32 partitions on the disk (which I formatted on a Win2K server just to be sure that the disk label etc would be okay) and format simply reports the disk as unlabeled. I suspect that the only way to mount a FAT/FAT32 volume in solaris 8 is by using a USB disk or floppy as these drivers seem to operate differently from the SD driver.
Anyway unless I can get one of the above alternatives working, I seem to be completely stuck with no common denominator between Linux and Solaris 8 for Sparc. Does anyone have a tip for me? ;)