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I have a CentOS bare metal with 1TB SSD and, a couple weeks after having my application in production, we noticed it needs to be case-insensitive.

Is there any easy way to accomplish this? Also, should we expect a long downtime?

Reason for wanting a case-insensitive file system:

We use Dropbox API as the core of our application to get files and store them in our server.

The API doesn't tell, in an efficient way, when a file has uppercase letters. From Dropbox API best practices: A common thing that trips up new developers is that the Dropbox 'file system' is case-insensitive, meaning that A/B/c.txt is the same file as a/b/C.txt and is the same file as a/B/c.txt.

and

Note: Dropbox treats file names in a case-insensitive but case-preserving way. To facilitate this, the <path> values above are lower-cased versions of the actual path. The last path component of the <metadata> value will be case-preserved.

More here and here.

While we can have some workarounds in the app itself to make this work, the best alternative for us was having the file system case-insensitive.

dmmd
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1 Answers1

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You could use a FAT32 file system under Linux. If you have to backup your data to another system and then restore it to a repartitioned box it could take a few hours. If there is enough space for both to coexist on the same box it could take a few minutes. You shouldn't use FAT32 for your entire OS, but you could make one partition your app. FAT32 partitions can only be 32GB so you make need to make more than one.

If you have enough free space you could create a FAT32 filesystem in a file and then mount that. It will not perform as fast as a raw partition, but it may be more than adequate for your short term needs.

chicks
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  • Any downsides on having FAT32 on Linux? – dmmd Dec 09 '14 at 20:03
  • The biggest limitation is that you can only have 32GB per FAT32 file system, but that is true of FAT32 in general. – chicks Dec 10 '14 at 00:58
  • The other big problem is that FAT32 does not support unix-style permissions or POSIX ACLs -- or any other file attributes that most unixen expect to exist. – Shadur Mar 05 '15 at 05:37