[ILUG] FTP-to-NFS gateways

[Justin Mason]

Liam Bedford said:

> > Liam Bedford:
> > > kernel		-ro,soft,intr		ftp.ie.kernel.org:/pub/linux
> > Does this work publically?
> 
> publically? It doesn't actually work :( I'd never tried it, and it tries
> to mount it as nfs, I think this is where you integrate the ftp file system
> idea that some of the gnome people are working on, so you can cd /misc/kernel
> which is actually an ftp site.

They're working on it? It's been done before with wwfs and something else
whose name I can't remember, so they could save themselves a lot of
trouble!

I think the main problem with wwfs (and mirror and other FTP-grabbing
utils) was that FTP sites don't have a standard format for DIR output, so
it can sometimes be tricky working out exactly what is on a remote site.

Also the way they did it was that it essentially provided a gateway,
re-exporting the remote filesystems as an NFS drive. Unfortunately doing
this meant that you stopped the gateway machine from being able to act as
an NFS server, since Sun's NFS only allowed one "NFS port" per machine on
port 2049 and provided no "-port" option to mount(8). A bit kludgey.

I used to run a wwfs gateway in Iona but we retired it when we moved to
Solaris 'cause I couldn't be bothered trying to port all that tricky RPC
code to SVR4 ;)

It would probably be better to do it as a libc wrapper, trapping open(),
read() etc. in the style of that "avfs" package for tar files etc.

--j.