Fedora core 4 Vs Readhat Advanced server 2.1

[Chakravarthi]

Hi,

I have FC 4 insalled on a machine with SCSI RAID Array connected. I have created few soft links in disk storage of raid array.

now i use the same RAID array to connect to a Readhat AS 2.1 installed machine. i can see all the files and folders, but cannont see the soft links active. they are present but they do not point, even though the source is present, i tried looking at the inode data, they are fine.


ls -l reports input/output error for those soft link files. if i connect the RAID back to FC 4 installed machine i can see the links active and i can use them.

when i try doing fsck on the partition on Redhat 2.1 AS server, it reported errors and cleared the link files.

now my question is there any change in file system type ext3 changes between these two version and how they handle soft links? this we observe only with softlinks.

thanks in advance

regards
chakri

[Gopi Sekar]

I do not know technically about the changes went in with regard to handling soft links from RHEL 2.1 to FC4.

But RHEL 2.1 is much much older than FC 4 and it is expected that the new version of an OS contains bug fixes and new features which can not be handled by older versions.

One major factor which immediately strikes is: RHEL 2.1 uses 2.4.9 kernel (without updates) and FC 4 uses 2.6.11 kernel. Linux kernel is almost rewritten from 2.4 to 2.6 especially in filesystem area. Also linux is not run by a big corporation where it has to provide backward compatibility support till there is one last customer using it.

So the problem you have reported is kind of expected, better try to find alternative method for this. Try hard links and see whether they solve your problem.

For your information RHEL 2.1 is almost in its EOL, RH is not going to provide any more updates.

Regards,
Gopi

[Devesh Pant_1]

How about vice versa. Try creating links on RH AS 2.1 and then check if Fedora can see them.
Also is it only with soft links or hard links too are not seen. I would definitely take it to the Red Hat support to find out if this is Fedora or is it the AS that is missing something.

thanks
Devesh

[Ross Minkov]

Just FYI -- HP offers Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 software technical support for the duration of customer support agreements.

Maintenance Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 is available June 01, 2005 (6/1/2005) through May 31, 2009 (5/31/2009). Maintenance Support is defined as HP will work with Red Hat to ensure HPâ s Security issues and critical bug fixes are released by Red Hat via an errata/security update. This Maintenance Support will be available for the duration of customer support agreements.

See http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=PSD_CN0606W for more details.

-Ross

[Gabriella Schmidt]

Did you disable POSIX Extended Attributes. and SELINUX during FC4 installation? If not, they are enabled per default, and the ext3 filesystem wil be incompatible with older versions.

Greetings
Guenter.

[Steven E. Protter]

FC4 is much more advanced as far as suppport.

I think there is an inherent problem with trying to mount disks on two sysems at the same time. High availability solutions have disk mounts move from node to node to get around this issue.

This may be a problem with the fact you are mounting the same disk from two servers. The good news is with HP-UX you would get and immediate crash.

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