[CentOS] Making a NAS/HFS server

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 14:09 -0700, Craig White wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 15:49 -0500, Steve Campbell wrote:
> > I ran into a problem that I couldn't resolve straight away, but would 
> > like to solve for sometime in the future.
> > 
> > We have a Thecus storage server (similar to a Buffalo TeraByte, if that 
> > helps?) that has a Mac filesystem on it. The mother board was failing, 
> > but the drives are still OK. A new box has been added, so the urgency is 
> > sort of gone. I was going to try and back up the data to a new CentOS 
> > 5.1 box I had until the new Thecus arrived, but ran into the problem of 
> > Mac resource forks not being copied when I mounted the Thecus as a CIFS 
> > system.
> > 
> > Is there a commonly used procedure to do the above task of copying a Mac 
> > (HFS, I think) system to a linux box from the linux box?
> > 
> > This sort of runs into another project we have in the works where we 
> > want to make the equivalent of a SAN/NAS type storage system. We want to 
> > have a cluster of Centos boxes running for shared storage, and have the 
> > ability to add to it seamlessly. But now, I'm wondering if it won't run 
> > into the same problem with the HFS or other filesystems that may be 
> > used. I understand NAS storage sort of handles the different filesystem 
> > protocols by interface, so I wondering if anyone has a pointer to 
> > something like this also.
> > 
> > Google keeps pointing me in a circle back to an old HFS+ driver that 
> > sort of stopped development in 2003. The trail ends very abruptly.
> > 
> > Sorry to be so windy, but offer thanks in advance for any clues.
> ----
> If you want to be certain that you preserve the Macintosh resource
> forks, you might want to add Netatalk (http://netatalk.sourceforge.net),
> which makes it a real AFPoverTCP file server. Then you use a Macintosh
> to copy the files over.
> 
> Otherwise, I would suggest that you use tar to copy the folders over
> which should preserve all of the contents.
> 
> Are you sure that those are really HFS (or HFSPlus) filesystems?
----
on second thought...tar probably won't work. Every system has a
different methodology for storing the resource fork (the Macintosh
curse).

Best to just use a Mac to copy Macintosh files and let each system
create/maintain/discard resource fork info as it sees fit.

Craig