I just wanted so share a few thoughts here
on creating a virtual file system.
I move around from computer to computer, and it's
nice to have access to all my files, along with the symbolic links etc. So
what I did was create a file and mounted it as a drive. Then, when I moved
to another computer for a few hours, I just copied the file and mounted in again
on the second computer. True, I could have used ssh; but, it was kind
of nice to have the speed of accessing it locally. Anyway, it works
well for me...these are the steps I use:
1. Construct a 10MB file, or bigger:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/disk-work
count=20480
By the way, dd defaults to blocks of 512 so the
above will = 10MB = 20480*512. The "if=/dev/zero" stand for read
from file, and /dev/zero will zero everything out. As you can probably
guess, "of=/tmp/disk-work" creates the file. You should probably
create it in your home directory "of=/home/<your name>/disk-work"
since you'll have more space and it won't get deleted.
2. Make an ext2 (or ext3 if you want) file system.
I believe the difference is ext3 is a journaling filesystem; but, it doesn't
handle recovery as well as ext2.
mke2fs -q /tmp/disk-work
Hit yes for confirmation, and it's going to ask
this because it's a file and not a drive.
3. Create a directory, su -l to root, and
mount.
mkdir /work
su -l
mount -o loop=/dev/loop0
/tmp/disk-work /work
Now to use it, cd /work and create files
etc.
4. When you're done with it, unmount
umount /work
What's nice is it's mounted similar to a
drive. A "lost+found" directory is created. In addition, if
more drives are needed, use /dev/loop1, /dev/loop1 etc. By the
way, CD-ROM's can be copied to a file and mounted as well for faster
access.
Regards,
Mike Chirico