Will Prater wrote:
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.
If the Macs are saving to the NAS using AFP, then "seems" to support
resource forks is not quite the same as actually supports resource
forks. Resource forks are part of the filesystem -- if the NAS is
using
HFS+ as its filesystem then it would actually support resource forks.
If it does not use HFS+ as its filesystem (much more likely), then AFP
will map the resource fork data to ._ files upon copying the data
to the
NAS. When the file is copied back from the NAS, AFP will look for the
corresponding ._ file and read its contents into the copied file's
resource fork. Here, the resource fork is stored as a regular file and
when you mount the files over NFS on your backup server, the ._ files
should be there as well and rdiff-backup should be merrily copying
them.
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?
It turns out extended attributes were introduced as part of FreeBSD
5.0
(see http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=extattr&format=html).
The
second of those two Python modules added FreeBSD support in September.
You can get it from http://undefined.org/python/ -- scroll down to
xattr. Install that, and you should see extended attributes support
turn
on in rdiff-backup.
I can't tell if FreeBSD's extended attributes depend on the underlying
filesystem, or are implemented at the virtual filesystem (VFS) layer.
Note also that since your backup target is mounted over NFS, whether
there *are any* extended attributes to be backed up depends on 1) the
NAS and 2) the NFS setup exposing them.