[CentOS] Centos 5 will have full NTFS read write support?

Wed Apr 4 18:32:24 UTC 2007
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>

On 4/4/07, Greg Bailey <gbailey at lxpro.com> wrote:
> David G. Miller wrote:
> > John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org> wrote:

> Could it be that Red Hat doesn't enable NTFS in their kernels because
> they simply don't want to support NTFS?
>
> -Greg

In a way.. the read/write support for NTFS has always been best as you
can get by not having any specs. Back in 1999 there was some talk
about having it in the 6.x releases, as many people said it was fully
ready etc etc. The testing ended up being something like this:

Install NT-4.0 on system, install RHL-6.x with NTFS installed. See if
you can mount system, read from system, and reboot into NT-4

We repeatedly ended up with dead NT-4 boots, while we could get NT-3.5
working. Later times with Windows 2000, XP etc have usually ended up
with similar stories. While the support got better, the amount of
eating the babies was still high enough that it is not commercially
supportable.

Heck the amount of time I spent answering tickets that went like this
was enough:

Customer: Your OS ate our HR system! We need it back right away.
US: Be nice and calm customer down..
Customer (eventually); Well I installed 6.1 and then compiled the
kernel with NTFS support to get the data off our HR system.
US; well that was unsupported..
Customer: Well I am going to post to Slashdot about how crappy Red Hat
support is.
US: ok...

Customer posts bad experience (sans the part where they broke their
kernel and used bad practices for moving data from a sensitive
machine...)


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"