On Apr 2, 2005 3:27 PM, Andy Sy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
--
JM Ibanez --
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does
not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the
free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
-- Bertrand Russell
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/~jmibanez/
http://www.mycgiserver.com/~butiki/
JM Ibanez wrote:
> My main qualm about VFS magic to make remote filesystems look local is
> that it makes users forget that the filesystem is remote-- which means
> that the code has to do all this black magic to make sure that the
> remote filesystem acts local. I mean, especially with FTP or anything
> over the Internet, you'd probably be better off *knowing* that the
> filesystem is remote, because having the VFS (i.e. either through any
> userspace magic or through some FS modules) hide that from you might be
> dangerous. For example, what if you write a file into an FTP server
> exposed as a local filesystem and the connectivity between you and the
> server goes down? At least with an FTP client you know that you're
> dealing with something remote and you know the limitations of the
> protocol, etc. If the VFS hides that from you, then IMHO you might lose
> data.
Note that the Samba or NFS mounts face similar issues - and they
do have ways of dealing with that. The main difference to
consider with FTP-as-filesystem is speed and interactivity - since
it will usually be used over a WAN link (aka: Internet) rather
than LAN.
Understandably, they do. :) It's an acceptable trade-off if you're running it on a LAN; however, the relative unrealibility of the network is more apparent over a WAN link, something which you'd be using FTP for as I understand it. In fact, I don't think the FTP protocol was designed to be used as part of a VFS layer, and may in fact present novel challenges to a VFS layer designer. Samba and NFS are both designed with VFS issues in mind (or at least were designed in the knowledge that they would be exposed to common local filesystem operations such as locking, etc.); having to kludge stuff like that onto a protocol like FTP is dangerous, IMHO. (Let me backtrack a bit -- the earlier versions of the NFS protocol did not even have locking, and so the locking feels and acts like a kludge, among other kludges...)
--
JM Ibanez --
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does
not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the
free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
-- Bertrand Russell
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/~jmibanez/
http://www.mycgiserver.com/~butiki/
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