Helen Borrie wrote:

> What I can't predict (though someone else will step in here to
> comment) is what will happen if 64-bit chips are in the
> equation. Current distros of Firebird are all 32-bit applications,
> which a Windows and some Linux distros will run transparently as
> 32-bit. I have no idea what happens when a 64-bit OS writes to or
> reads from a FAT32 filesystem.

It does the same. FAT32 has the defined format for filesystem. In fact I
share few FAT32 partitions between 64bit Debian and 32bit Windows 98
without problems. However, it does not define what you write in the
file, so I would be more concerned if 64bit Firebird and 32bit Firebird
have the same ODS? I assume they do, so no problem.

> However, I'm nervous about "residing on a FAT32 filesystem", simply
> because, in my ignorance, I suspect that Linux systems accessing
> local FAT32 partitions do so via the NFS.

Nope. It is read/written to directly, just like any other regular
filesystem (ext2, ext3, reiser, whatever).

> I believe Linux can
> read and write at file-level to a non-native partition, but would
> come to grief when trying to operate on block addresses within a
> file, or to allocate more blocks to the file.

I have a Linux application that runs from a bootable Linux CD, and uses
FAT32 partition of hard disk for database storage. It runs in production
on two sites since 2003 - without any problems.

Just make sure you use forced writes.

--
Milan Babuskov
http://www.flamerobin.org