Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Is there a 'distro' that is known to see xfs partitions ? Just tried Live Centos, it saw the hardware (yay, el-cheapo VIA, I was kinda concerned about that) and it said it started the xfs service, but when I did a < mount /dev/sda8 /disk > (yes, I made the mountpoint first) it declined.

"unknown filesystem type 'xfs' "

Grrr.

Suse looked a little nicer but I made the mistake of trying to change the screen resolution. That was all she wrote, had to pull the plug to get the kompewter back. Looked kinda pretty tho - Kawasaki green. Reminded me of duHamel crashing in the pits, crashing out the entire front row at Laguna Seca, crashing crashing crashing. He was good at that.

No wonder they picked that color.

One other small speed bump, is it possible to make any of these live CD's use a real ip ? I don't want to have to set up a fricking dhcp server just to get the damned files out of this box

I have to go wash my hands now. They smell like poo.

The 'xfs service' you saw may have been the x font server. Just sayin' The only linux install I have is a debian virtual machine that does have an xfs module installed (it's pretty much default), so perhaps you have to modprobe it or however you do it these days.

I agree with duck's suggestion that the XFS service is likely the old X Font Server rather than anything to do with the filesystem. More importantly, I agree with his recommendation of Debian. I use Debian on XFS on both my main workstation and my in-house fileserver.

Two things to note, though, if you're trying to use a Linux box to read XFS filesystems from IRIX:

1. While Linux should theoretically be able to read XFS filesystems created on IRIX, I've never actually tried it. I've only used XFS filesystems created on the same Linux box. So no guarantees from me that it'll work for you.
2. You need to be sure that the Linux box has the proper options enabled in the kernel in order for it to understand SGI's partition table format. AFAICT, the current Debian stable kernel does. It's possible that the CentOS box you tried couldn't understand the IRIX partition table, even if it could have supported the XFS filesystem.

Of course, if you've got XFS filesystems from a Linux box to read on another Linux box, then the above are moot points.

There shouldn't have to be any service or daemon running to use XFS filesystems. I don't know about CentOS specifically, but I know that vanilla Debian and Debian live CD's have XFS filesystem support. There is a kernel module already built for it and included in the default kernel package. You should be able to do:


If you run your mount command (which is correct), then the Linux kernel should automatically load that module. If you still get errors, you can try running:


That should load the module for sure, and then check to see if it's loaded. Again, I don't know if CentOS specifically has the XFS module built for its live CD's, but I know that the Debian KDE live CD includes the XFS module for sure, as do normal installs of Debian. Maybe Red Hat / CentOS just didn't have enough room on their live CD? Quite strange.

centos supports xfs just fine. linux xfs that is, i never tried an irix disk.

Thanks, y'all. I will try burning a late-model Debian. I'm hoping that this was just a problem with the live CD being circumscribed by size or something. At least it saw the VIA chipset, which is what I was most worried about.

And I would not have been amazed if Centos did start up xfs as a "service" ... everything else is a systemD thingy. NFS is a "service" in Solaris ... but I'm not going to try it again and take notes, not worth the effort

I'm a little surprised that no one has tried to rescue an xfs disk under Loonix when your last SGI box went kerblooey ? If it ever works, this could be a practical way for people to kill the password problem, too. SCSI instead of sata but same principle.

hamei wrote: I'm a little surprised that no one has tried to rescue an xfs disk under Loonix when your last SGI box went kerblooey ?

maybe most guys have at least one other sgi or backups

hamei wrote: I'm a little surprised that no one has tried to rescue an xfs disk under Loonix when your last SGI box went kerblooey ?

Really? a whole box going Kerbooey? For me it's never the box itself, it's always a drive. For example, that time when the 9Gb drive in my first O2 died. Which was extra super mega annoying as I had just moved a great deal of data on to it from ZIP-disks and other 'iffy'-media in order to bakkittupp to CD.

foetz wrote: maybe most guys have at least one other sgi

Only the 3x series can read sata

Had an Octane and an O2, the O2 fried itself. Can't blame it too much, summer weather gets pretty hot. But the Octane got replaced by a Fuel.

The Fuel was faster, when it decided to boot. Picked up an O300, that one was reliable but no graphics. V-bricks and X-bricks are rare. So it got 'upgraded' to an O350.

When the Fuel finally ran out of spare parts and decided it was never going to start again, I transferred the drives to the O350. Then the boot disk started getting flaky. Got another. Backed up the booter. After a week or two the second one got flaky. Well shit. Must be a fake. Put the first one back in, it was okay for a few days. It went flaky again, bought a brandy-brand new disk. It got flaky. Mr Stupid here (me) thought he was having a batch of bad disks.

Uhh, no. Hauled the Octane out of the closet and got 'er running. The 'flaky" disks were fine. It was the O350 that was flaky.

It's now up in the loft. The Fuel went into the garbage can and I plan to inflict the dead O2 on some poor unsuspecting victim as soon as practical.

If the Octane dies, it's 'fuck this shit' for me .... so far, the Octane and the Indigo (1) have been my most reliable SGI's. 99 times out of 100 those two boot up.

or backups

Have two disks. One is the data and the other is the backup. XFS is a very reliable file system - if you have something that can read it

jimmer wrote: Really? a whole box going Kerbooey?

See above

For me it's never the box itself, it's always a drive. For example, that time when the 9Gb drive in my first O2 died. Which was extra super mega annoying as I had just moved a great deal of data on to it from ZIP-disks and other 'iffy'-media in order to bakkittupp to CD.

Yeah, I had a three-drive (4.5 gb each) software raid that I had just replaced with a new big 18 gb drive. During the data-transfer process something went kerblooey.

Isn't there a law about that ? "Things will always go wrong at the worst possible time" ?

Three varieties of live CD dloading now. Let's see what happens ...

hamei wrote:

foetz wrote: maybe most guys have at least one other sgi

Only the 3x series can read sata

ah sure, that's a special case since sata is not "real" sgi

foetz wrote: ah sure, that's a special case since sata is not "real" sgi

Seems kinda real, it's xfs But yeah, it's not classic, that's true ...

Now for the good news : yes, it is possible to read an Irix xfs disk from Loonix. Even better, you can use a live CD to rescue the files, so you don't have to dedicate an entire computer to this. It's reasonably easy, more or less.

I grabbed a few of what they call "small" distributions. Do you remember when people snivelled about OS/2 coming on 22 floppies ? Anyway, didn't feel like downloading three or four 700 mb files when I had no faith they would work, so went for the minimals.

Finnix - based on Debian ? - command line system, not bad, mounted the disk easily, set a static ip easily, it wasn't annoying, thought I was all set. Then I discovered there was no ftp. It includes 'lftp' but no ftp !! Oh goody ! I gave lftp a few minutes, then I pulled the disk out and frisbeed it into the trash. Finnix has now been deprecated.

grbl or something, wouldn't boot, broke the disk then tossed the pieces into the trash. grbl is deprecated too.

Ubuntu-Rescue. Went to mount the disk, it wouldn't let me be root, frisbeed that into the trash too. But I only d-loaded three, so went back to the trash and pulled it out, put up with those dipshits and their 'sudo' fixation long enough to do < sudo passwd root > and get away from their mentally-retarded little games. Similar to Finnix but HAS FTP ! Man, this is cool !

It would, however, be even more cool if the ip I gave the interface would stick for more than three minutes. That's likely to make transferring 500 gb sort of unpleasant.

So I'm back to the download search. There must be one reliable 'distro' that actually has ftp and can hold onto it's ip for ... oh, I dunno. Ten minutes would be an improvement.

But it is possible. That's good. Real good. About as pleasant as hanging from an airplane by a rope in your teeth, flying over a lake of hungry crocodiles, but with great rewards comes great aggravation.

If I ever complain about Irix again, someone slap me.

hamei wrote:

foetz wrote: ah sure, that's a special case since sata is not "real" sgi

Seems kinda real, it's xfs But yeah, it's not classic, that's true ...

it's not "real" because sgi never sold irix machines with sata (external storage systems not counted).

as for the actual problem, how about giving an ordinary debian a try? i could read efs cds with it maybe that's a sign?

foetz wrote: as for the actual problem, how about giving an ordinary debian a try? i could read efs cds with it maybe that's a sign?

It would probably work, the debian-based shorties I tried could mount the disk and read the files, they were just obnoxious to use.

I hesitate to say this, because it is truly annoying with a lot of "Buy Windows Washer Today !" "Buy Windows Virus Cleaner !" ads laid under the text, and it has this annoying logo underneath the screen that you can't read over very well, but the Trinity Rescue CD was the quickest and most professional (except for the stupid advertisements.) It was easy to set a static ip and the o.s. kept ! the ip. It had ftp. Next time I use it I may try to just set it up to share the whole disk. It was noticeably quicker than the Ubuntu and Finnix disks, too.

I hate to shill for these people 'cuz it felt kind of slimy to use, but it worked the best. And it's only about 150 mb. You could probably fit it onto one of those tiny CD's.

And it isn't 'hosted' at Sourceforge, so you can actually get it.

The other thing I found out was, I don't need the internet anymore. I must have about half of it already

So, in conclusion ladies and germs, if you have a sata disk built under Irix and your Irix machine blows itself sky-high, you aren't screwed. You can rescue it with a Loonix Live CD, don't even need to humiliate your computer with a permanent install. And it works pretty good. The BSD's should work as well, I would guess.

I bet this would work with scsi, also. Password removal, here's another method.

hamei wrote: The BSD's should work as well, I would guess.

ah yeah? did bsd get xfs support?

foetz wrote: ah yeah? did bsd get xfs support?

A bad guess ? They don't ? Why not ? They want to stick with something good like extfs ?

the default on freebsd is ufs(2) or zfs. according to the manpages there's further support for: cd9660, mfs, msdosfs, nfs, ntfs, nwfs, nullfs, oldnfs, portalfs, smbfs, udf, and unionfs.

openbsd runs on ffs (pun not intended ). additional support is there for: ext2fs, mfs, nfs, procfs, udf, cd9660, msdos, ntfs, tmpfs and vnd

foetz wrote: the default on freebsd is ufs(2) or zfs. according to the manpages there's further support for: cd9660, mfs, msdosfs, nfs, ntfs, nwfs, nullfs, oldnfs, portalfs, smbfs, udf, and unionfs.

openbsd runs on ffs (pun not intended ). additional support is there for: ext2fs, mfs, nfs, procfs, udf, cd9660, msdos, ntfs, tmpfs and vnd

msdosfs ? is that like FAT ? And no xfs ?

What a bunch of idiots

SGI developed the xfs driver for linux, I'm not sure anyone legally could make an xfs driver for the BSDs.

duck wrote: SGI developed the xfs driver for linux, I'm not sure anyone legally could make an xfs driver for the BSDs.

I hesitate to use wikipedia as a cource for anything but ...

the gossipy old ladies at wikipedia wrote: Silicon Graphics began development of XFS in 1993, including it into IRIX for the first time in its version 5.3 in 1994. The file system was released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in May 2000 and was ported to Linux by a team led by Steve Lord at SGI,[3] while first support by a Linux distribution came in 2001.

but it gets better

more gossip wrote: FreeBSD added read-only support for XFS in December 2005 and in June 2006 introduced experimental write support; however this was supposed to be used only as an aid in migration from Linux, not as a "main" file system. Support for XFS was removed in FreeBSD 10.

The removed it ? While maintaining support for msdosfs (but not FAT ?) and smbfs and lickmytoesfs ?

The more you look at this stuff, the smellier it gets

the oracle at wikipedia wrote: RHEL 6.0 includes XFS support for a fee ...

Perhaps that explains why my Centos live CD did not want to mount the disk ? Perhaps it was from that timeframe when xfs was an extra-cost addon to that particular free and open source linux ? No biggy now, the trinity rescue works okay and probably a lot of others do, too.


Meanwhile, back at the ranch, tried one other thing ... had an elderly xfs disk lying around that might have had some stuff deleted long ago that might have been worthwhile. As you know, there's no undelete for xfs. If you don't know that, you're smarter than me.

But there is a program from Mother Roosha called Raise Data Recovery. So I grabbed the demo, left the disk plugged into it ovenight, and it found a ton of deleted stuff. The demo only undeletes deleted files that are smaller than 64kb, so I tried that and it worked okay. There was nothing on the disk so great that I wanted to spend the $20 to register but if you did have something important that was accidentally deleted, this program is worth trying.

hamei wrote: But there is a program from Mother Roosha called Raise Data Recovery. So I grabbed the demo, left the disk plugged into it ovenight, and it found a ton of deleted stuff. The demo only undeletes deleted files that are smaller than 64kb, so I tried that and it worked okay. There was nothing on the disk so great that I wanted to spend the $20 to register but if you did have something important that was accidentally deleted, this program is worth trying.

another alternative is http://www.ufsexplorer.com/download_pro.php