[ENBD] Re: remote floppy and vfat filesystem

[P.T. Breuer]

In article <200410051626.15774.pat at patdouble.com> you wrote:
> I am having trouble using ENBD to access a remote floppy with a vfat 
> filesystem on it. I am using kernel 2.6.8.1 (also tried 2.6.7) with 
> nbd-2.4.32pre.tgz of date 29 Sep 2004. The problem is that when I mount the 
> floppy on /dev/nd/a/0, copy a file to it, umount then mount again, the file 
> is gone. The strange thing is that using the ext2 filesystem I have no 
> problems.

Then it never was written. Enbd knows nothing about filesystems - only
blocks on disk and reading and writing to them. It does nothing
different under a vfat filesystem than under an ext2 filesystem.

> If I perform the same mount, copy, unmount, mount using the floppy from the 
> local machine (the machine the drive is connected to) there is no problem.

I would suspect that you are not syncing, despitewhat you say.

> I've tried calling sync before unmounting both on the client and server end, 
> it doesn't help. The filesystem formatting works well, the vfat filesystem is 
> recognized on a Windoze machine.

> Any ideas?

Perform some debugging, mount the fs sync, etc.  It sounds to me as
though some ioctls are sent over with vfat that need to be supported,
but yu'll be able to tell me if you do some debugging.  You'll have to
say if you load the remote ioctl support module ...

Anyway, I can check for you. I am now back from the states and as soon
as I have slept a little I have some debugging to catch up on. 

Anyway, one thing to check would be if this is kernel specific. 2.6
kernels are still pretty much black art, and I haven't tried anything
beyond 2.6.7 (which however, I do have ready to go in uml form ...).

Peter