how do I read old squashfs filesystems?

Moriah

I have a ton of dvds that are backups of the filesystems on my network. They are written using squashfs, but not the current sys-fs/squashfs-tools 3.1_p2 version that I just installed on my backup server. I lost the old backup server software due to a catastrophic error during updating, so I just re-installed it from the latest livecd. It is an amd64 box with thr 2.6.20-gentoo-r8 kernel. I really want to use the latest squashfs, but I need to be able to have backwards compatibility to read the old backup disks. Is there any way to do this?

Thanks!

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whig · l33t Joined: 27 Nov 2004 Posts: 973 Location: New Zealand

Get the old source and compile it manually - don't install it. Run that unsquashfs (as root for ownerships) to unpack the old archives and get the files you need.

Moriah · Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 9:14 pm Post subject:

Is there a way I can mount the old squashfs systems so I can browse the directories, or must I unsquash the entire thing before I can search the directories?
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whig · l33t Joined: 27 Nov 2004 Posts: 973 Location: New Zealand

I don't know about doing a mount, the command complains of unknown filesystem type here. Because the listing of squashfs files is so fast it isn't a big problem for me. Random file extraction is fast too unlike tar archives where preceding data has to be parsed.

Moriah · Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 4:15 am Post subject:

I have never used unsquashfs, so I am not familiar with it.

I always just mounted the dvd containing the squashfs, and then treated it like any other filesystem. These dvds contain a squashedfs that fills the old 4 gb max size for a squashfs. They average 8 to 12 gb uncompressed. They have literally hundreds of thousands of files in them. For details on how I make them, see:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-245019-highlight-pumpkins.html?sid=308f8bbe2375919bcb85bafce4d60c10

I was wondering if by using loadable modules, and the ability to unload a module, if I could "fool" the kernel by loading squashfs (or whatever the kernel module is called) for normal work with the new squashfs format, and then unloading the squashfs module and loading an "oldsquashfs" module, which would be the old squashfs module. When I was through working with depricated dvds, I could unload oldsquashfs and load squashfs again.

Does this sound feasible?

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whig · l33t Joined: 27 Nov 2004 Posts: 973 Location: New Zealand

You can try it

And maybe "unsquashfs -ls /dev/cdrom" works too.

Moriah · Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 9:37 pm Post subject:

unsquashfs -ls /dev/cdrom probably does work, but is not nearly so flexible as a dired buffer in xemacs.

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