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Quandary
Asked: 2010-03-24 04:17:33 +0800 CST

Linux: Case-INSENSITIVE Filesystem

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What methods are there to make the Linux filesystem case-INSENSITIVE ?

I have asp.net applications developed on Windows, but there are always issues with capitalization/spelling on mono when putting it on Linux.

One way is to mount a localhost SMB share to /var/www. Are there any others ?

linux filesystems mono case-insensitive

5 Answers

  1. There's a case insensitive ext3 driver, but, frankly, running such a thing in production would scare me a bit, since you're rolling your own custom kernel with patched-in drivers. (Yeah, yeah-- we did that all the time "back in the day", but that was, like, 1997...)

    There's a FUSE implementation, ciopfs, that implements case insensitivity as well. That would be a lot less scary to me to use in production than a patched kernel.

    You could also use a case-insensitive filesystem, like VFAT, for the /var/www folder hierarchy. I'd use a loopback mount in that case, such that you don't have to mess with your disk partitioning.

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  2. If you're talking about case insensitivity ONLY within apps running under Mono, you can use the IOMAP environment variable to tell mono to ignore case just like Windows does.

    See the details on its use here: http://www.mono-project.com/IOMap

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  3. Best Answer

    Necromancing.
    Answering my own question.
    This is indeed possible.
    Variant 1:
    Create a .dsk-file of size X-MB (with dd), then make a JSF-filesystem on that file, with option O (OS2 compatibility - = case insensitive)
    Then loop-mount that file into a desired folder. 

    (apt-get install jfsutils)
dd if=/dev/zero of=jfs.dsk bs=1048576 count=150
mkfs.jfs -O jfs.dsk
mkdir -p /mnt/jfs
mount /volumes/jfs.dsk /mnt/jfs -t jfs -o loop
umount /mnt/jfs/

    Variant 2:
    When you install the OS, manually partition the disk, and create another partition with format JFS, which you mount to wherever you want to have it.
    When everything is up and running, you can reformat that partition with (warning - this will erase all data on that partition - make sure you selected the proper one, and don't have any data on it, yet):

    unmount the mounted partition

    umount /web

    reformat:

    mkfs.jfs -O /dev/hda5

    remount the partition 

    mount /dev/hda5 /web

    Now run 

    blkid

    and you get the new partition-uuid.
    Now go to /etc/fstab, and replace the old uuid for /dev/hda5 with the new one.

    If you're doing this wrong, see also
    Welcome to emergency boot mode...

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  4. @Quandary I tried going the JFS way, making a img with -O option. But for me it still gives errors. For example I get:

    System.InvalidOperationException
The view 'Logon' or its master was not found. The following locations were searched:
~/Views/Account/Logon.aspx
~/Views/Account/Logon.ascx
~/Views/Shared/Logon.aspx
~/Views/Shared/Logon.ascx

    The aspx file is actually named LogOn.aspx. It did solve a few issues, but I still get errors. Unfortunately I am still on 18.04 so can't try the ext4 way.

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  5. You can make a ZFS dataset case-insensitive with:

    zfs set casesensitivity=insensitive pool/dataset

    Plus you get all the usual benefits of ZFS, like error-correction, compression, snapshots, snapshot-based zrs send backups that are several orders of magnitude faster than rsync, etc.

    I have yet to use this on an actual server (because I don't run Windows software on servers) but I do use it on home systems for Steam game libraries (I have different datasets for Linux native games and Windows games to run with Proton/WINE - the Windows datasets are case-insensitive because Windows devs are sloppy about upper/lower case in file/dir names).

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