COMP 3000 Lab 4 2012

This lab is not yet finalized.

A few guidelines:

Submit your solutions for both Part A and Part B via cuLearn by Friday, October 19th at 11:55 pm.
Please answer using a single text file (with a .txt extension). Do not submit doc, docx, pdf, or other formats. Also, please do not submit an archive (zip, tarball, rar) of multiple text files, just upload one. Anything other than a single text file will receive no credit.
Show all your work. Short answers are not sufficient; you should list any websites or individuals you consult and should document any experiments you conducted. For any question that you could just answer without any external reference or experiment, write "(no work required)" after your answer.
All submitted code and commands should compile and run. Partial code fragments or explanations may not be given credit. While code may use standard C and UNIX/Linux libraries, no code should rely on external binaries.
The exercises in this lab require root access on a Linux system. Note that an Ubuntu Live CD should be a sufficiently powerful environment if you do not have an already installed system. Just boot the CD in the VM and select "Try Ubuntu."

Part A

Be sure to do the following questions in order.

[2] Run the command truncate -s 1G foo. What is the logical size of foo, and how much space does it consume on disk?
[2] Run mkfs.ext4 foo. (Say "yes" to operating on a regular file.) What is the logical size of foo now, and how much space does it now consume on disk?
[1] What command do you run to check the filesystem in foo for errors?
[2] Run mount foo /mnt. What error do you get? Why?
[1] Run mount -o loop foo /mnt. Why does this one work?
[2] Run rsync -a -v /etc /mnt. What does this command do? Explain the arguments as well.
[2] Run umount /mnt. What files can you still access, and what have gone away?
[1] Run dd if=/dev/zero of=foo conv=notrunc count=10 bs=512. What does this command do?
[1] Run mount -o loop foo /mnt. What error do you get?
[2] What command can you run to make foo mountable again? What characteristic of the file system enables this command to work?

[6] Create a simple C program to generate a file consisting of the word "Hello", one thousand bytes of blank space (null bytes), and then "world\n", and then another thousand null bytes, such that the file produced consumes the maximum amount of space given its contents.
[6] Create a C program "mycopy-blocks.c" that takes three arguments: a block size and two filenames A and B as command line arguments. This program should copy the contents of A to B, making B a byte-for-byte copy of A, except that the length of B should be evenly divisible by the block size. The file should be padded with nulls as necessary. Zero bytes in A should consume little to no space in B, however, including the padding.
[4] How could loopback mounts be useful when working with virtual machines? What conditions must the VM software meet for this to work?