Can't Create SymLinks on CF Card
I found this when using tar to unpack an OS image archive. I've been doing this for a while on another CF card and had no problem. But now, when I untar the archive, I keep getting cannot create symlink and operation not permitted. I bypassed tar and tried creating some of the symlinks by hand and got the same error. The CF card is mounted in /mnt/flash. I umounted the drive, cd'ed back to /mnt/flash and ran the very same tar command again and it created the files and symlinks without any problem. So I can create the symlinks to that directory when nothing is mounted, but when I have a CF card mounted there, I can't create symlinks (and have other problems with tar). For example, if the boot directory is there, with the files in it, and vmlinuz is in /mnt/flash/boot, then I do cd /mnt/flash and ln -s boot/vmlinuz ./ I get the same error: Operation not permitted. But if the drive is NOT mounted and I create (from the archive) /mnt/flash/boot, with the same file structure, and do the same two commands to get in /mnt/flash and create the symlink, it works just fine. The only difference is that at one point the files exist on a CF card and the other time they're on the virtual hard drive (this is in a VM in Parallels, the guest OS is Squeeze). I've tried this with another CF card and it works fine. I've even tried it in another mount point and it works. The only time it does NOT work is with this particular CF card. I can unpack files to it and they are there and verified, but I can't create symlinks on the card. Unfortunately, ln doesn't provide any useful information with the verbose mode (other than listing the files it's working on). Does anyone have any idea why I can create and save files on this CF card and cannot make symlinks on it? Thanks for any thoughts on this! Hal -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/2d7e5954-b4cc-430f-8587-a902426e3...@halblog.com
Re: Can't Create SymLinks on CF Card
On 2011-02-22 21:14 +0100, Hal Vaughan wrote: I found this when using tar to unpack an OS image archive. I've been doing this for a while on another CF card and had no problem. But now, when I untar the archive, I keep getting cannot create symlink and operation not permitted. Looks like the card is formatted with an unsuitable filesystem (e.g. FAT32). Does anyone have any idea why I can create and save files on this CF card and cannot make symlinks on it? Most probably because the filesystem on the card does not support symlinks. Sven -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87y657pxhm@turtle.gmx.de
Re: Can't Create SymLinks on CF Card
On Tuesday 22 February 2011 14:14:37 Hal Vaughan wrote: I found this when using tar to unpack an OS image archive. I've been doing this for a while on another CF card and had no problem. But now, when I untar the archive, I keep getting cannot create symlink and operation not permitted. I've tried this with another CF card and it works fine. I've even tried it in another mount point and it works. The only time it does NOT work is with this particular CF card. I can unpack files to it and they are there and verified, but I can't create symlinks on the card. Does anyone have any idea why I can create and save files on this CF card and cannot make symlinks on it? Check the file system type. FAT and NTFS aren't real UNIX file systems, so they can't store certain types of files. NTFS supports hard links after a fashion, and MS Windows supports symlinks, sort of but not at the same level as a UNIX filesystem. There may also be other troublesome file systems, but all the old stand-bys (ext*, reiser*, xfs, jfs) and newcomers (btrfs, zfs) work fine. The problems almost always are in compatibility file systems. (Even the iso9660 file format had to be extended to support UNIX semantics, but those came before Linux, IIRC.) [I didn't mention many the kFreeBSD file systems, but that's just because I'm not familiar with running on kFreeBSD.] I seem to remember that there was a tool I contributed to that check a file system for proper UNIX semantics. It was originally destined to test fuse file systems to see if they were acceptable as a home directory (e.g. making /home/myuser a fuse-webdav mount point), but I believe it does at least check for symlinks being available. It is written in C, but it is fairly easy to read. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. b...@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/\_/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: Can't Create SymLinks on CF Card
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 4:32 PM, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. [I didn't mention many the kFreeBSD file systems, but that's just because I'm not familiar with running on kFreeBSD.] Debian/kFreeBSD uses UFS2 (Universal File System version 2) which also fully supports posix syntax for symlinks. C- -- Did you know... If you play a Windows 2000 CD backwards, you hear satanic messages, but what's worse is when you play it forward ...it installs Windows 2000 -- Alfred Perlstein on chat at freebsd.org
Re: Can't Create SymLinks on CF Card
On Feb 22, 2011, at 4:31 PM, Sven Joachim wrote: On 2011-02-22 21:14 +0100, Hal Vaughan wrote: I found this when using tar to unpack an OS image archive. I've been doing this for a while on another CF card and had no problem. But now, when I untar the archive, I keep getting cannot create symlink and operation not permitted. Looks like the card is formatted with an unsuitable filesystem (e.g. FAT32). Does anyone have any idea why I can create and save files on this CF card and cannot make symlinks on it? Most probably because the filesystem on the card does not support symlinks. You're right on target with that. This is part of a program to install Squeeze on an embedded system and a Compact Flash card wasn't working, so I made a quick trip out to buy a few more. In that time I forgot I had commented out the command in the code to partition the CF card and format the partition. The report I got from sfdisk had the same numbers for the partition size as what I was specifying, so I saw the numbers and assumed it was okay -- without realizing it specified the FS was FAT. So it was my fault -- I forgot my program was not formatting and read the numbers and not the additional data. It's behaving nicely now. Thanks for picking up on something that was so obvious I missed it! Hal -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/9b2c27ee-3cf8-420d-b606-32b4c0cd0...@halblog.com
Re: Can't Create SymLinks on CF Card
On Wednesday 23 February 2011 04:14:37 Hal Vaughan wrote: I found this when using tar to unpack an OS image archive. I've been doing this for a while on another CF card and had no problem. But now, when I untar the archive, I keep getting cannot create symlink and operation not permitted. Is your drive read-only? I bypassed tar and tried creating some of the symlinks by hand and got the same error. The CF card is mounted in /mnt/flash. I umounted the drive, cd'ed back to /mnt/flash and ran the very same tar command again and it created the files and symlinks without any problem. So I can create the symlinks to that directory when nothing is mounted, but when I have a CF card mounted there, I can't create symlinks (and have other problems with tar). What options have you used to mount the CF card? What is the filesystem on it? For example, if the boot directory is there, with the files in it, and vmlinuz is in /mnt/flash/boot, then I do cd /mnt/flash and ln -s boot/vmlinuz ./ I get the same error: Operation not permitted. -- Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
