You can mount NTFS file system on Linux box, you will need to re-compile the kernel and enable NTFS support or install it as a loadable module (search freshrpm). It's a pretty safe operation if you only mount it read-only but you will see a bunch of warning about corruption if you mount it read-write. Let's say you do get it mounted read-write ..what's next ? Is your Linux box joined to active directory, how is it going to do the authentication ?  How about installing VMware server (free as in beer [IMAGE] ) on one of your Linux cluster nodes, install a Windows server VM, join it to active directory and then present windows LUN as "raw device mapping".  Boot it up, assign drive letter and file system should be available. If you have a lot of shares on your windows cluster, you can write a wmi script to export HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares key to a file every so often. If disaster strikes you can use this key to import all the share definitions, restart "Server" service and as long as directory structure and drive letter is the same you are back in business. Now running in a VM may not provide the same performance you would expect from a windows box but you are in system down situation so degraded performance is expected (depends on your SLAs).  If you have SnapView license, try this process with a snapshot or clone of your production LUN. Hopefully this makes sense [IMAGE] .
I would like to know if it’s technically  possible to mount a Windows filesystem  on a Linux machine in order to share with samba(if i have a operation recovery problem with my windows cluster systems; Currently couple of  LINUX file systems are  shared with windows clients using samba). I mean in case of total crash of the windows cluster, the  goal for us is to connect(make avilable)  the windows data (part of the Clariion disks)     any one having such setup ? Or any thought on this..
possible to mount a Windows filesystem on a Linux machine ?