Re: [rdiff-backup-users] FreeBSD and xattr OS X support

[Will Prater]

Thanks for your informative response, my comments are inline.

On Oct 24, 2006, at 3:12 PM, Andrew Ferguson wrote:

> Will Prater wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > Im trying to get Resource for support on FreeBSD 6.1.  Here is the
> > output from rdiff-backup:
> >
> > ====================
> > address@hidden /usr/ports/sysutils/rdiff-backup]# rdiff-backup -v5 --
> > print-statistics /host/cobalt/c/fun/ /backup/cobalt/funUnable to
> > import module xattr.
> > Extended attributes not supported on filesystem at /host/cobalt/c/fun
> > ACLs not supported by filesystem at /host/cobalt/c/fun
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------
> > Detected abilities for source (read only) file system:
> >    Access control lists                         Off
> >    Extended attributes                          Off
> >    Case sensitivity                             On
> >    Mac OS X style resource forks                Off
> >    Mac OS X Finder information                  Off
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------
> > <snip>
> > ======================
> >
> > How does one get the "Mac OS X style resource forks" and "Mac OS X
> > Finder information" options enabled?  Is this something to do with
> > pyxattr?  I could not seem to get that module to install on FreeBSD.
>
> All five of these things refer to different properties *of the
> filesystem* that have or have not been detected.
>
> Only the Mac filesystem HFS+ supports "Mac OS X style resource forks"
> and "Mac OS X Finder information". Unless you have some bizarre setup,
> you shouldn't expect to see that as 'On' for a Free BSD box. If your
> FreeBSD box *does* use HFS+ as a filesystem, you'll have to use a  
> python
> distribution where the usually Mac-only calls are enabled for your OS.

I do have a bizarre setup.  I have a NAS that all our mac clients  
save their data too, they are saving over AFP and the Infrant NAS  
seems to support the Resource Forks.  I NFS mount the NAS to my  
backup server when backing up.

I was hoping for a way to force the features on.

> Extended attributes are file attributes at the filesystem level. I  
> know
> ext3fs has them (but you need to explicitly turn them on as a mount
> option) and the Mac HFS+ filesystem has them. The python module  
> pyxattr
> (http://pyxattr.sourceforge.net/) supports them for ext2/ext3 or  
> XFS on
> Linux and the python module xattr (http://undefined.org/python/)
> supports them for HFS+ on Mac OS X.

Is there no way to force this on a FreeBSD system then?

> One last note: if the system you are backing up from supports  
> feature X
> and the destination system does not support feature X, rdiff-backup  
> will
> store the properties of feature X in it's metadata file and restore  
> the
> metadata on the backed-up system upon file restore. This is what makes
> rdiff-backup perfect for backing-up, say, Mac OS X machines to Linux
> servers.

With this being said, maybe I am in the blue, not the red.


-Will