[Gllug] Partition a 2 TB drive for storing films

[Nix]

On 7 Mar 2010, John Winters uttered the following:

> Caroline Ford wrote:
>> You'll regret ext3 if you ever need to use the drive on a non-Linux  
>> machine.
>
> "Non-Linux machine"?  Sorry, not a phrase I'm familiar with.  :-)
>
>> I regretted making my music drive ext3 when Ubuntu had  
>> problems with permissions it just didn't have on NTFS.
>
> I'm not sure what you're saying there.  I've never encountered any
> *bugs* in ext2/ext3 permission handling in over 15 years of using them.

Given that all ext[234] does with permissions is store them, I'm not
surprised :) any bugs would be in the VFS if they were anywhere.

>  Of course, the whole idea of permissions sometimes surprises people.

Permissions on removable devices are particularly strange to deal with.
(Also, obviously, mounting with nosuid,nodev and possibly noexec is a
good idea if it's a user mount.)

Also, it is probably still possible to feed the kernel a sufficiently
corrupted ext[234] filesystem and have it execute arbitrary code, or
crash (these bugs are still being squashed). But you're not allowing
hostile local users to mount these filesystems so that's not a concern.

> Ext3 also has the advantage over NTFS that it's stable and documented,
> which means that you can if you want use it on either Windows or Mac OS.

Take care. It's not as 'stable' as all that. A filesystem with a given
combination of feature flags turned on should always be readable, and
depending on the flags, writable, on a given system. But changes to the
FS *do* happen and flip new flags on (e.g. htree indexing).
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