[UFO Chicago] Network fileshares

[Larry Garfield]

I believe Nate was playing with something called sfs at one point.  It 
was in alpha, but did what you are asking, I think.  After the 
appropriate authentications, it mounted, with encryption, a remote 
directory to /mnt/sfs/adfg87adfkj2458g098hgh453@othersystem.com/ or 
something equally obscure (the mess there being the public key, I 
think), which you could then symlink to from anywhere.  The nice part 
about sfs was that it maintained file permissions across the network 
properly, although the last alpha I saw had them labeled wrong still. 
:-)  (Vis, it worked properly, but ls mapped the remote user ID number 
to the local user database, so it displayed the wrong name.)

Nate was rather taken with it, but I never really played with it since 
my main file sharing would be between my GNU/Linux box and my Windows 
box, and Windows supports only SMB and now WebDAV.  I've never cared for 
Samba (mostly because SMB is an absolutely horrid protocol as far as I 
can tell), and as you say WebDAV still needs a little work, although I 
really need to look into it again.  Maybe we should try playing with it 
together, and see how far we get.

Ian Bicking wrote:
> What do people use for network fileshares?  I'm getting annoyed with SSH
> and all that junk, and I'd really like to just be able to mount network
> drives over the internet.
> 
> There's NFS, which I've never much used -- I never get good feelings
> from people, security and otherwise... can it work well over the
> internet?  How hard is it to install on the server?  I can install
> whatever junk on my (client) workstation, but it's harder on the
> servers.
> 
> There's Coda, which I don't know much about... it sounds a lot better,
> but also less mature.  Has anyone tried it?
> 
> MacOS X, interestingly enough, seems to use DAV (on Apache) for
> filesharing.  That's very cool.  But the DAV clients on Linux aren't
> that great... I've got davfs working, but it's got high latency.  I
> might experiment more with it later.  Positive side: very easy to set up
> the server.  I bet MacOS X has a speedy client, with good caching and
> intelligent server interaction.
> 
> There's various virtual filesystems, like Gnome VFS, Emacs' Tramp and
> EFS, and maybe some others.  I probably should figure out Tramp more,
> but it's been a real pain.
> 
> There's also the possibility of using CVS as a sort of networked
> filesystem.  Have other people tried this?  I'm still not really
> comfortable with CVS, though I've finally gotten used to the basics.  It
> does offer some other useful features besides networking...
> 
> Any other ideas?  (I'm searching for optimal productivity, one piece of
> the environment at a time.)

-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
lgarfiel@students.depaul.edu	ICQ: 6817012

-- "If at first you don't succeed, skydiving isn't for you." :-)