steemd doesn't support NTFS drive

justyy (84)in #steem • last month

I recently repurposed an unused Intel NUC by installing Ubuntu 24 on it, but it doesn’t have enough internal storage. To compensate, I connected an external USB drive formatted as NTFS. I tried running a backup instance of steemd on that drive, but it failed — likely because NTFS doesn’t support proper Linux file ownership or file locking, which steemd depends on.

RocksDB requires POSIX file locking (fcntl/flock) to ensure only one process writes to the database at a time.

The NTFS-3G driver does not support POSIX file locks properly on Linux.

So any app using RocksDB (like Steem, Hive, or similar blockchain nodes) will fail to open the database if it’s stored on NTFS.

Even if permissions (uid, gid, etc.) look fine, RocksDB still cannot lock its LOCK file because the filesystem driver rejects or ignores the locking call.

Workarounds that don’t work

Changing mount options (permissions, uid=1000, etc.)
→ won’t fix it; the problem is lack of lock support, not permissions.
Running as root or --privileged
→ still fails, same reason.
Using Samba or NFS mounted from NTFS host
→ same underlying issue: no file locks.