Re: Advice wanted: WebFS term project

Erik Mouw (J.A.K.Mouw@its.tudelft.nl)
Tue, 12 Oct 99 18:49:00 +0200

On Tue, 12 Oct 1999 11:26:45 -0500 (CDT), Drew Bernat wrote:
> I'm working on a web-based filesystem for a class term project. The idea
> is to be able to have web servers show up as directory trees on the local
> machine. Example:
>
> cd /web/www.cs.wisc.edu/ ; cat index.html
>
> would be equivalent to pulling the page down. Right now the HTTP access is
> handled by a user-level daemon, and the kernel filesystem is an
> indirection layer. The FS gets a read request for a file, passes it to the
> daemon which either a) downloads the file or b) retrieves it from on-disk
> cache, passes a pointer (of some sort) back to the kernel, which returns a
> file descriptor.
>
> Now for the questions.
>
> 1) Is this sane?
> 2) Where should I start looking to write a FS? I've looked through the
> O'Reilly site, but all I found was "Kernel device drivers" which I'm
> not sure is what I want.
> 3) Suggestions? I'd like this to have an existence after the end of the
> semester.

Use the autofs filesystem to do those spooky automatic mounts.
/etc/auto.web would reduce to:

www.cs.wisc.edu -fstype=web,ro http://www.cs.wisc.edu/

Now write your webfs to mount and get the pages you want. Somebody was
working on an experimental ftpfs long time ago. Maybe there is still some
code left at tsx-11.mit.edu or sunsite.unc.edu. Otherwise, look at NFS and
CODA.

Oh, and what do you want to do with webservers which don't have index.html
as their default page? And also think about the fact that the webserver
won't give you a list of files when there is an index.html file.

Erik

-- 
J.A.K. (Erik) Mouw, Information and Communication Theory Group, Department
of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems,
Delft University of Technology, PO BOX 5031,  2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands
Phone: +31-15-2785859  Fax: +31-15-2781843  Email J.A.K.Mouw@its.tudelft.nl
WWW: http://www-ict.its.tudelft.nl/~erik/






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