Office for Mac can't read files from ZFS

[Ritesh]

Hi all,

first of all I would like to thank the maczfs developers for the
wonderful product. I have a dual booting machine with Mac OS X 10.6.8
and Fedora 15, and ZFS is the only reliable way I've found to share
files between the two OSs.

There is one constant source of irritation though: Word, Excel and
other Office for Mac apps can't read files from a ZFS volume.
Unfortunately there isn't much debug info I can provide, I only see a
popup window saying that ZFSPOOL:<path_to_file> can not be found.
Here's some of my ZFS configuration:
[ritesh]$ zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
zfsPool 69.4G 616G 325K /zfsPool
zfsPool/Classes 69.5M 616G 69.5M /zfsPool/Classes
zfsPool/Finances 17.2M 616G 17.2M /zfsPool/Finances
zfsPool/Matlab 137M 616G 137M /zfsPool/Matlab
my zpool is mounted at /zfsPool so that I see the same path in both
Mac OS X and Linux.

If this can be resolved, that'll save me a lot of file copying to and
fro the ZFS volume.

Thanks,
Ritesh

[Dan Shoop]

Have you considered enabling FileVault for the user's who's accounts are on the ZFS volume?

-d

-----
Dan Shoop
masterof...@gmail.com

[Ritesh]

> masteroffoxho...@gmail.com

Hi Dan,

thanks for the response. I don't have FileVault enabled, I don't
really have a need for it. Besides, I don't want to introduce another
layer of complexity in an already complex setup. Also, could you
please shed some more light on how FileVault might be related to the
issue that I'm seeing?

Thanks,
Ritesh

[Daniel Bethe]

Here's my completely unhelpful comment on the subject.  It reminds me of OpenOffice's quest for total compatibility with Microsoft, because I remember the day in about 1999 or 2000 when the ReiserFS team released a single patch to their kernel filesystem code for the sole purpose of unbreaking compatibility with OpenOffice ;-)  At one point, OpenOffice simply would not work with files stored on ReiserFS.

Sorry for your troubles!  It seems that's a new one!  Try LibreOffice.  ;)

[Jason]

Not sure what this might be, we have yet to see this issue. Several clients use the new MS Office against my advice. They access over a network to a Windows 2003 server running in a VM on ZFS file system without issue. I'll have to test a direct access to a ZFS file system from the app to replicate your environment. I'll try to do that tomorrow.

Could it be a permission/ownership issue you have set? Just curious as its weird. ;)

Jason
Sent from my iPhone

[Chris Ridd]

On 9 Feb 2012, at 22:38, Jason wrote:

> Not sure what this might be, we have yet to see this issue. Several clients use the new MS Office against my advice. They access over a network to a Windows 2003 server running in a VM on ZFS file system without issue. I'll have to test a direct access to a ZFS file system from the app to replicate your environment. I'll try to do that tomorrow.
>
> Could it be a permission/ownership issue you have set? Just curious as its weird. ;)

Or it may be assuming that some of the Carbon calls work on ZFS - the sort of calls that TensComplement had to implement for Zevo which aren't part of mac-zfs?

Chris

[Ritesh Sood]

I did a few experiments:

1. Created a zfs filesystem zfsPool/temp2 and set the mountpoint as /Volumes/temp2 instead of my usual /zfsPool/temp2. The purpose was to check if the apps definitely have to have paths starting with /Volumes
2. Changed permissions of /Volumes/temp2 to a+w

However, none of the above fixed the issue.  What Chris has mentioned about Carbon calls that had to be implemented for Zevo looks like a promising lead. Hopefully the maczfs team can look into it.

If it is the case that the issue will be resolved in the near future, I'm considering migrating to Zevo. One question towards that end: would uninstalling maczfs and then installing zevo be painless?  As in my storage pools, filesystems, and configuration will be preserved, right?

Thanks again,

Ritesh      

[Alex Blewitt]

On 10 Feb 2012, at 19:03, Ritesh Sood <rites...@gmail.com> wrote:

> However, none of the above fixed the issue. What Chris has mentioned about Carbon calls that had to be implemented for Zevo looks like a promising lead. Hopefully the maczfs team can look into it.

It's also possible that it works on the root pool but not nested file systems on the same pool. There are certainly some differences in the paths between the two.

> If it is the case that the issue will be resolved in the near future, I'm considering migrating to Zevo.

Did you mean "not resolved"? I'm pretty sure this issue has been known about for a while so it's not likely to be fixed imminently.

> One question towards that end: would uninstalling maczfs and then installing zevo be painless? As in my storage pools, filesystems, and configuration will be preserved, right?

Uninstalling MacZFS is trivial - just remove the extension. As for import into Zevo my understanding was that reading pool v8 was disabled. I don't know if that is still the case but again you would have to ask them.

Going the other way is not supported in any case as the Mac code is too far behind.

Alex

[Daniel Bethe]

>> However, none of the above fixed the issue.  What Chris has mentioned about
> Carbon calls that had to be implemented for Zevo looks like a promising lead.
> Hopefully the maczfs team can look into it.

Wow I didn't know that ZEVO implements a Carbon-related API.  That's interesting.  I bet that there are a lot of apps which need that.  I have seen installer applications for intel-compatible apps, where the installer is a PPC app ;-)  That was the case with Final Cut Studio 2.

>> If it is the case that the issue will be resolved in the near future,
> I'm considering migrating to Zevo.
>
> Did you mean "not resolved"? I'm pretty sure this issue has been
> known about for a while so it's not likely to be fixed imminently.

Alex, he's saying that *if* these theories all align, then his personal issue would be theoretically resolved by installing ZEVO.  Maybe.

The MacZFS FAQ details the implications of migrating between ZFS implementations.  The Twitter feed for Ten's Complement says a long time ago that they were testing the migration path from MacZFS to ZEVO.  They had it disabled in the beta, but I guess they have full backward compatibility now.  I don't know; I haven't read anything new.

[Chris Ridd]

On 10 Feb 2012, at 23:14, Daniel Bethe wrote:

>
>
>>> However, none of the above fixed the issue. What Chris has mentioned about
>> Carbon calls that had to be implemented for Zevo looks like a promising lead.
>> Hopefully the maczfs team can look into it.
>
>
> Wow I didn't know that ZEVO implements a Carbon-related API. That's interesting. I bet that there are a lot of apps which need that. I have seen installer applications for intel-compatible apps, where the installer is a PPC app ;-) That was the case with Final Cut Studio 2.

I'm not sure Carbon is an accurate description - apologies for any confusion there. What TensComplement claim to support is:

"Full native support for the extended Mac OS X APIs including, native extended attributes, bulk access, named-streams, lookup-by-id and searchfs (PBCatSearch)."

Googling for PBCatSearch turns up references to Carbon FileManager.

To clarify my guess, maybe Office is assuming some of the extended OS X APIs?

Spending 19.95 USD would give a quick answer. As would (cheaper) asking the TensComplement folks directly if they've tested MS Office opening documents from their pools.

Chris