Comments on: Snapshots on DreamHost

By: Asko

Asko — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 10:50:08 +0000

It sounds like NetApp Filer (NAS, NFS/CIFS/HTTP/iSCSI). Filer is *very* nice product for file storage and sharing.

By: andy

andy — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 15:42:17 +0000

Thanks so much for this tip! I was doing some more digging before my 97 days are up to make these guys are for real. I am having a hard time finding anything wrong with them! hourly snapshots!!!! who else does that for $15 a month???

By: Jerry Kindall

Jerry Kindall — Wed, 11 May 2005 21:22:34 +0000

You don’t need a hacked ls; I’m pretty sure they must be using some filesystem that supports named forks, or something of that nature. Mac OS X lets you access the resource fork of a file as filename/..namedfork/rsrc, for example. Not that they’re using Mac OS X, I’m sure they’re runinng on Intel, probably Linux of some sort — I think ReiserFS supports this, but I’m not a Linux guy so I’ll shut up now.

By: Scott Johnson

Scott Johnson — Tue, 10 May 2005 18:31:29 +0000

It could be that they have just hacked their copy of “ls” to not display the .snapshot directories. Actually, there are many different hacks that I could think of that could achieve this same result with little effort.

By: Jesse Ruderman

Jesse Ruderman — Thu, 05 May 2005 01:40:45 +0000

I am curious about that too. It probably happens at the filesystem level so that it can use copy-on-write and block-sharing, so it could be as simple as making the “what files are in this directory?” API function omit .snapshot.

By: Jeremy Dunck

Jeremy Dunck — Thu, 05 May 2005 00:31:05 +0000

DJC, you’d also have to have an audience like Jesse has.

Any idea how they make files not visible even to ls -a?