cygwin on Mac: files in Virtual PC "shared folder"

[Ashley Ward]

On 13 Apr 2005, at 11:29 pm, Larry Hall wrote:
> At 04:29 PM 4/13/2005, you wrote:
>> I'm experimenting with using cygwin on my Macintosh PowerBook (running
>> OS X 10.3.8) within Virtual PC 7.0.1.  My aim is to be able to 
>> continue
>> developing the Windows port of our research software ("EDEN").
>>
>> Cygwin (1.5.14) seems to work OK in this environment in most respects
>> -- but I have a problem with a particular kind of filesystem.
>>
>> Virtual PC has a "shared folder" facility, which can be used to mount 
>> a
>> folder in the Mac file system as a drive within Windows.  When viewed
>> using the Windows file explorer, the drive has a network drive icon.
>> This facility is apparently implemented in the "Virtual Machine
>> Additions" (a package you install in Windows which adds facilities
>> specific to Virtual PC.)
>>
>> I'd like to use shared folders to hold our source code files so I can
>> do source code searching/editing/commit using a Mac application, and
>> use cygwin in VPC purely for compiling and testing.
>>
>> I have no problems using shared folders with Windows tools (eg the 
>> file
>> explorer).  But in cygwin, I have various difficulties.
>
> Given what you've described, this sounds like Virtual PC isn't 
> providing
> a completely consistent view of the Mac file system.  Looking at your 
> 'cygcheck' output substantiates that view.  The file system type as 
> shown
> claims that the Mac shared folder is a "net" resource (correct) of 
> file system type "ø" (not correct ;-) ).  This information comes 
> straight from
> the Windows GetVolumeInformation API.  So it clearly isn't giving 
> Windows
> all the right information.  With this fact, I expect that only someone
> running Virtual PC on a Mac and using it to access the Mac file system 
> is
> going to be able to debug this and provide a solution.  I'm guessing 
> that the
> number of people on this list with that same configuration is minimal 
> at
> best.  You may well be on your own on this one.  Alternatively, you 
> should
> find that using SAMBA to share the same information on the Mac works 
> well.
> I haven't tried it and I don't use Virtual PC but sharing directories 
> from
> Linux to Windows works fine for me either directly or with a VMWare 
> client.
> YMMV.

Thanks, Larry -- I appreciate the reply.

Yes, I did notice the strange character in the cygcheck drive listing 
output.  Is the information from GetVolumeInformation used by cygwin to 
determine how to treat the volume?  (Ie is it possible that the 
nonsense output is the root of the problem?)

I've had a little look in the microsoft.public.mac.virtualpc Usenet 
group and have seen a few reports of other people having problems with 
the shared folder facility with various Windows programs (MS Project 
2003 Pro and MS Money).  Very little detail is given though and the 
problems appear to remain unsolved.

I did try sharing the Mac files to cygwin in VPC using the Samba server 
included in Mac OS X and this did actually work, after I figured out 
multiple problems:

1) VPC needs to be run in "Virtual Switch" networking mode, so the Mac 
and PC have different IP addresses and can see each other.  I don't 
know (although I'd like to!) whether an active Ethernet connection is 
required for VPC and the Mac to talk and if the traffic actually goes 
out onto physical Ethernet.

2) The '\' character used in Windows share names is an escape character 
to bash -- so the example "mount \\pollux\home\joe\data /data" in the 
cygwin manual (example 3.10) is misleading.  For me, that style of 
example gives error messages about "/data", not the Windows share 
(actually the cause of the problem), which doesn't help.  I do see the 
mentions in manual around that point about using the Windows command 
shell (presumably with the cygwin bin in the PATH?) and also about 
using '/' rather than '\', but it doesn't seem very clear to me -- 
perhaps the example could be changed to "mount '\\pollux\home\joe\data' 
/data"?

3) I did manage to mount the share by enclosing the share name in 
single quotes as above, but then access to the mount point with ls, cd 
etc failed with "invalid request code" - sigh.  Finally I gave up on 
cygwin "mount" and instead mounted the share as F: using right-click 
and "map drive" in Windows.  It was then accessible to cygwin under 
/cygdrive/f.

File and directory meta data was all correct in Windows Explorer.  In 
cygwin, file meta data was OK, but directories were all dated 1 Jan 
1970 and had a very large size listed in "ls -l".  This was good enough 
for compilation though.

Because of these issues, my preferred solution would be to use Shared 
Folders -- if it worked, it'd be a lot simpler than Samba -- no 
separate server and configuration to worry about.  I might try 
following up the issue with MS VPC support in the newsgroup and then 
possibly through their email or phone support (although it seems I 
might have to give them a credit card number first! :<).

I'd appreciate any thoughts on the above Samba issues though.

Also -- if there aren't any VPC-on-Mac users on this list, are there 
any VPC-on-PC users?  Would VPC-on-PC have related issues, or is this 
problem just due to the VM additions implementation of access to the 
Mac file system?

Ashley.


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/