I currently have NTFS partitions on my slackware file and print server. I can not use FAT32 format because I have files that are larger than 4 gig, so my issue is this. What format can I use that will give me read AND write access for windows PCs while not having to worry about the eventual fragmentation that is associated with NTFS?

This is a samba share folder.

If it is shared over Samba, the file format does not matter, if I remember correctly. Make it whatever Linux file system you want. I know that XFS has a file system reorganizer (i.e. defragmenter)....

Not sure what you mean.
If you are accessing the files from windows machine via samba, then the file system doesn't really matter as far as the clients are concerned. So you can use anything you like, ext3, xfs, jfs, etc.

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!

Since you are using 'SAMBA' then the filesystem on the server is transparent to the client. So I would setup a ext3 or equivalent on the server. Now if you want to share R/W partitions then that's a different animal all together. You could always setup 'ntfs-3g' on your server for that then work via 'NFS' to the M$ systems.

'File- and printersharing on the local network' by Alien_Bob is an excellent wiki to get some useful information.

The above link and others available from 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

For read access over samba I know that format does not matter. But I would like to write on the hard drive from a Windows PC e.g. copy "file A" to the file server. I do not want to have to install ext3 support on every windows computer that needs to write. I already have samba set up to share with read and write access to NTFS formated hard drives, but I am worried about fragmentation on them and as I said I have .iso bigger than 4 gig so FAT32 is not an option. Is NTFS my only option?

This is what we are telling you. Over SAMBA, the windows clients see the partitions shared over SAMBA as NTFS even though they might be ext3. It's transparent to the clients. I share a large ext3 partition via Samba as well as NFS so I can access what I need on that partition regardless of whether my laptop is running Windows XP or Slackware (my laptop tri-boots windows, slack 12.2, and current)

Personally, I have NEVER shared a drive that was formatted with NTFS over SAMBA or NFS and I would be very leery of doing so. My server shares are always formatted with a native *nix filesystem - usually ext3, but I have also used reiserfs.

The limitations you are describing are only in cases where you are sharing a partition on the same machine that boots both Windows and Linux and you want to share a partition between the 2 OS's on that one machine. It's not true in the case of a file server using SAMBA.

HTH

Ok I am currently going to experiment with it. But I think I had problems doing this before, could have been a bad install. On the plus side I did figure out how to mount, read, write and share NTFS under linux. I think thats a bit of an accomplishment. Thank you guys for the input will post my resaults.

That worked thank you all for your help.