[erlang-questions] servers for mountable remote file systems

[Robert Raschke]

On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 9:30 AM, Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I want to make a remote virtual device that I can mount on mac-os X/linux
> etc.
>
> It seems like there are three alternatives
>
>     a) webdav
>     b) samba/smb
>     c) NFS
>
> I need an Erlang server that implements a virtual file system as a
> back-end to the protocol
> in question.
>
> I can imagine emulating a large number of small files - the mounted
> file system would appear to have a
> large number of small files - but in fact these would not exist but be
> emulated in the server.
>
> Has anybody implemented servers for the above protocols in Erlang? or
> do I have to start from
> scratch? Is any of these protocols to be preferred over the others,
> given that I want to emulate
> a large number of small files. Is my list a) - c) complete are there
> other protocols I should consider?
>
> /Joe
>
>
If it's OK to also supply some kind of client to your users, then I'd
recommend targetting 9P (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9P) as it is at least
one order of magnitude simpler than NFS or samba (not sure about webdav).

There's a Linux implementation for it here:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/v9fs
And the original documentation is here:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/sys/man/5/INDEX.html

The canonical example of a 9P server is ramfs.
In C: http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man4/ramfs.html
In Go: http://code.google.com/p/go9p/source/browse/p/srv/examples/ramfs.go

Robby
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