I need not remind you that file systems front-ending onto random protocols
are a bad idea for a huge number of reasons :-).
That said, you might take a look at Intermezzo, which someone has already
refered to indirectly in response to your e-mail -- Intermezzo is a file
system for Linux (based on Coda) that allows perl programs to provide the
back-end for a file system. I assume this is done in the style of
AFS/Arla/Coda by having a small kernel module that up-calls to userland
using a /dev/whatever entry, and then a userland program that satisfies
the requests in some or another way. If you're really interested in
implementing yet-another-nasty-file-system-abomination, take a look at
Arla and rip out the AFS bits and replace them with HTTP bits :-).
Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project
[EMAIL PROTECTED] NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services
On Sat, 10 Mar 2001, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> A few of us were talking on IRC tonight about how cool it would be to
> have an httpfs filesystem -- then it occurred to me we almost have
> this already, in the form of the (under-utilised) portalfs. Portalfs
> works by handing off everything to a userland daemon which handles the
> actual transaction request, so you could easily imagine extending it
> to provide an http method similar to the tcp method it currently has
> for initiating tcp connections.
>
> One could probably make this more generic and finish implementing the
> undocumented 'exec' method (which currently exists as a stub): this
> would run an administrator-specified command (i.e. fixed in
> /etc/portal.conf) and pipe the output back to the user.
>
> A fully navigable httpfs (e.g. one you can ls and cd around in) is
> more work and probably requires a full stacking layer, but this would
> still be pretty cool.
>
> Is anyone feeling inspired to implement this? :-)
>
> Kris
>
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