This Old External Hard Drive

Most external hard drives when purchased are probably formatted with as NTFS. This shouldn't be too much of a problem, but you will need to request that your host has the NTFS tools installed on it to mount it and then be again to read/write to it.

If you decide to reformat an external drive in the EXT file system there are some things to be aware of.

1. Permissions
   1. File and direction permissions are maintained from one system to the next.  The permissions that are set by your home system on the external hard drive carry over to the ECN host as well.
2. User ID (uid) and Group ID (gid)
   1. The file system looks at the uid and/or gid of a file or directory. It doesn't concern itself with the username or group name. You can have the same username on both systems but different user or group name.

Recommendations if you do use the EXT file system

1. Use EXT4.

   1. EXT4 does fsck (a check of the file system ever so many boot ups or period of time) much faster than EXT3. What can takes hours on an EXT3 will take minutes on an EXT4 file system.

2. Have an account on your home system that matches the uid and/or gid of your ECN account
3. To find your uid and gid's ssh into your ECN host or open up a console and run the id command
4. usermod changes an accounts uid
5. groupmod changes a group's gid
6. The account that is having it's uid changed can not be logged in nor having any processes owned by it running.
7. You can then use the chown and chgrp commands to change the ownership of files to the account that has the same uid/gid of your ECN/Purdue Career Account.