(17-08-2017, 02:21 AM)josuah Wrote: portable server solution

>another machine dedicated to distribute a networked filesystem
That doesn't seem very practical/portable.
>no much bigger than an external hard drive
You said it yourself
>This would involve having another computer. A RaspberryPi or other ARM board, an old laptop
Carrying two laptops in my backpack doesn't seem very portable.
An rpi is indeed small, but if I'm going to use it outside of my home/apartment, I'd need a battery and at that point stops being practical.
>But I hate when solutions involve money.
Yeah, I really don't feel like spending money on something as trivial as this.
Having, for example, a GNU/Linux VM on *BSD to which I'd pass the external drive and access it's, let's say ext4 partition from *BSD via nfs seems a bit more practical and less bothersome than what you're suggesting and it'd cost no money at all.
But I'd rather just trust pizzaroll1 and use ext2.
>ZFS has great features and a lot of attention, but its license is not compatible with Linux's so it is not bundled with it.
I could just give up on OpenBSD and use zfs.
But I'd still be interested in the best way to use the external drive under all 3 OS's, just for the sake of it.

(16-08-2017, 09:26 PM)pizzaroll1 Wrote: Ext2 on OpenBSD is good enough, in my opinion.

I hope so, I feel like it may be my best option if for some reason I can't use ext4 through FUSE on OpenBSD.
>you didn't mention Windows, so this is perhaps not relevant
True.

(17-08-2017, 02:57 AM)kyberkhrime Wrote: FAT32 is really your best bet, as much as I hate it

I'd really hate it..
>Using ext2 on OpenBSD is like using Windows ME - you can do it, but nobody will pity you when you lose all your data.
ext2 seems like my best hope right now.
Did you hear of anything bad happening to someone just reading and writing to an ext2 partition under OpenBSD?
>What about using a cheap VPS or one of the cloud services out there (yes, even Dropbox is acceptable, given some precautions are taken)?
I already have an external drive, and I'll only have like 3 GB of bandwidth (from my phone) and going to places that have wifi would really be time consuming and bothersome.

(17-08-2017, 07:48 AM)1Byte Wrote: Is this a file system question, or a server question?

It's a "best way to share an external HDD between GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD" question, and when you take into account my circumstances, it almost comes down to a file system question (almost, because maybe there are some ways to go about that and not yet make it a file system question, like what josuah proposed (although that probably takes the external HDD out of account) and the VM thing I mentioned, or using FUSE like tudurom suggested).

(17-08-2017, 06:05 PM)tudurom Wrote: You can use ntfs-3g, which is a FUSE filesystem

FUSE seems promising.
>Bonus benefit: you can use the external HDD with windows PCs.
I don't really care about windows.
I'd prefer a better file system, like ext4.

Apparently I can use this
https://github.com/gerard/ext4fuse
to access an ext4 file system with FUSE on FreeBSD.
Should I expect this to also work fine on OpenBSD, since it does support FUSE?
It'd be nice if I could just use zfs and access it on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD normally and on OpenBSD through FUSE.
I found GNU/Linux packages like https://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/otherosfs/zfs-fuse
but I didn't find the source code, the upstream homepage seems to be gone and even if I did find the code, idk if it'd work on OpenBSD.
Thoughts?