pfs_mount gone, but what about joliet?

[Rodney Hills]

I know joliet is a "Windoze" CD format- But what are the chances of getting HPUX to read that format.

My reasoning is this-
- I download software depots from the internet.
- I would like all these depots on a CD so I don't need to use online storage on the HP.
- I use my PC CD burner (don't have one on the HP).
- PC burner software only does Joliet and Rock/Ridge
- Rock/Ridge file system has a naming limitation that prevents me from using the depot names downloaded (example- perl-5.6.1-sd-11.00.depot). This name is greater than 32 characters and has characters not allowed with Rock/Ridge).
- Thus I must munge the name to make it fit.

Anyone else in this same situation? Any software solutions available?

Thanks in advance...

-- Rod Hills

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Rod:

For what its worth, there is a very good Knowledge Base paper on CDROM formats (#KBAN00000858). It's an interesting read if you haven't seen it. It seems like HP-UX simply dismisses Joliet in favor or RockRidge. Too, look at how long we've had to put up with pfs_mounts to be before having a "native" mechanism ;-)

Regards!

...JRF...

[Bill Hassell]

Chances of HP-UX reading Joliet? Slim and none. It took 9 years to get RockRidge support into the native cdfs code (just this month for 11.0)

Solution: Buy a SCSI CDROM burner for your HP-UX system and download cdrtools so you can burn them on HP-UX and have a full array of options. Your PC software is extremely limited and designed exclusively for PC usage. CDROM formats are complex and although there are industry standards (Yellow Book, ISO 9660, RockRidge, ECMA 168, POSIX, etc), some have conflicting formats. mkisofs is vastly superior to most PC-based tools in the number of options available. The man page goes over the non-standard features that affect portability. And no, mkisofs will not create a Joliet image.

[Rodney Hills]

Thanks for the responses.

To justify a CD burner for our K360, I would have to find some other uses for it.

I'm looking at Gear Pro for win2k for about $150, that writes a true rock/ridge format. I'm currently using Easycreator from adaptec and it does a limited IS 9660 standard.

-- Rod Hills

[Bill Barto]

I'm in the same situation for a different reason -- our company subscribes to a DVD data distribution from the government (FAA) that comes as Joliet format. Since we don't control the disk production process, there's no way to get them to use Rock Ridge format.

Also, there's no way to easily convert the 8.3 names back into their original file names. We thought about a Windowz utility that would read all the files on disk and create a CRC plus filesize for each and build a table that maps the real filename to its size and CRC. On the HP we would then have to import this mapping table and try to match everything up. Messy messy messy.

HP - Any help here?

[Bill Hassell]

You said it: Joliet is a PC format--not MAC, not Unix, not universal in any way. Your PC (and HP-UX) can write RockRidge and your filenames are NOT limited to 8.3, UPPERCASE with a revision number. Almost 2 years ago, the RockRidge patches were made available to solve the critical reliability problems associated with PFS. Now there will never be RockRidge for 10.20 except using PFS, but you simply add the 3 latest RockRidge patches for 11.00 and 11.11 and RockRidge (wih long filenames and MiXeDcAsE) is standard--just mount with the -orr option. If your man page for mount_cdfs does not show -orr, you don't have the patches.

There is virtually no possibility for Joliet on HP-UX unless someone with a lot of extra time wants to write it. As mentioned, it took almost a decade to add RockRidge support to HP-UX. It should be noted that every CDROM written in RockRidge (aka, POSIX or ECMA 168) actually has 3 directories on the CD with the 8.3 names and their matching long names. PFS was a hack to read the raw CD tracks, perform an internal translation and then export the results via NFS to the local system (with NFS stability issues). Normally,I would suggest that anyone wanting Joliet support would contact Interex and have them lobby HP for the needed feature, but...contact your HP sales representative.

So you can certainly download the depots, use Adaptec/Roxio, Nero or most any CD mastering program to create RR CDs. NOTE: the 3 patches must all be installed and in the configured state or the -orr option is silently ignored.

[CAS_2]

I read the doc KBAN00000858.

One issue discussed in this doc is that pfs_mount is no longer needed to mount RockRidge CDs if patches are installed in your box.

This might make some people believe that PFS should be removed from HP-UX.

I think PFS is needed for mounting RockRidge images previously copied to a local disk. Accoding to my experience, "mount" command cannot mount CD-images contained in local file systems because the first argument must be a disk device file.
For example, I used this method to mount all Oracle Installation CDs in order to have them available at the same time instead of replacing the CD media once Oracle Installer request next CD.

[maxhell]

Bill, you should try the Windowz ported cdrtools.
The mkisofs create a multi-fs (Juliet + RockRidge + HP-native) ISO image.
The Juliet DVD long names are preserved.
You can burn ISO image with your favourite burner on HP-UX or Windows.