Re: Advice wanted: WebFS term project

Tom M. Kroeger (tmk@cse.ucsc.edu)
16 Oct 1999 12:48:27 -0700


Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu> writes:

> On Tue, 12 Oct 1999, Drew Bernat wrote:
>
> > Now for the questions.
> >
> > 1) Is this sane?

IMHO it's doable but kludgey and requires sever side executables.

> You have no readdir() and
server side execs is you only option here, /cgi-bin/ls?/foo/barr

> no random access to files.
http 1.1 supports byte ranges so I think this can be done.

I've done some prototyping work on this exact thing, the jist was this:

You can't create true fs semantics without the use of sever side execs
(cgi-bin of whatever). Doing a read-only is much easier than a read
and write. To write you'd need to use http 1.1's PUT which I found to
be occasionally implemented not to spec.

Amen Vidaht did exactly this in WebFS as a graduate student at UC
Berkeley I think it was published in 98. He's now and Duke, so
check his home page there.

There was something called userfs - which allowed you to
swap in ftp or http. I never tried it.

What I'd like to see instead of http and ftp is a file-system that
uses scp & ssh as the transport. It would be a secure method to mount
remote files on machines that you don't have root access on.

-- 

tmk

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