[erlang-questions] simple virtual file system in Erlang?

[Joe Armstrong]

Yes - mapping the path to a content addressable store address would be
great. It would also be great in a wider context.

A fun extension would be to add a an http interface. Something like

   POST <blob>

To store <blob>,  then later

   GET /blob/sha256/<SHA>

to recover the blob. <SHA> is the SHA256 checksum of the data (the
path contains the
type of the checksum - so you might say GETblob/md5/<MD5CHECKSUM>

then add a DHT - then run on every webserver on the planet
then store all data forever.

The nice thing about this is that it's self-securing - a person-in-the-middle
cannot change the data without it being detected (since you can check
the SHA of the
data when you get it back)


Such a system has three relatively simple layers

- transport (say HTTP over TCP)
- DHT
- storage

If you ask Jesper nicely he'll tell you all about DHT's :-)

Have fun with the storage layer for this (and no it's NOT a toy project)

/Joe

On Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 7:57 AM, Jesper Louis Andersen
<jesper.louis.andersen@REDACTED> wrote:
> The simplest way is probably to map a path to its data, where the path is a
> list of components. That is, the UNIX file ls in /usr/bin would be
> represented as ["usr", "bin", "ls"].
>
> But you could also go the way of Plan9's venti. Map something like ["usr",
> "bin", "ls"] into a sha3 checksum of the data currently residing in the file
> and keep the data inside a storage suitable for storing data by its content
> addressing. venti also extends this by storing a tree of 64 kilobyte blocks
> which can then be regarded as the data when taken together. Thus, you have
> two components: the data store, and the path mapping service, mapping a path
> to the underlying data.
>
> This idea has the advantage of being practically useful in many situations
> beside a toy example :)
>
> On Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 2:46 PM Marco Molteni <marco.molteni@REDACTED>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hello colleagues,
>>
>> I would like to start from the presentation "Build an FTP Server with
>> Ranch in 30 Minutes" and really build an FTP server, so at a certain point I
>> need to hit the filesystem.
>>
>> Since the idea is still as a presentation (as opposed to building a
>> production FTP server) I don't want to touch the real filesystem of the
>> host, I want to use a as simple as possible virtual filesystem. It could be
>> backed by DETS or Mnesia for example, or it could stay only in memory.
>>
>> On the other hand, it must still behave as a filesystem, that is, it must
>> be hierarchical, so a direct mapping to a key/value store would not be
>> enough. In the spirit of simplicity, I don't need any concept of read/write
>> permission, I simply need a sort of graph with two types: inner nodes are
>> directories, leaf nodes are files or empty directories.
>>
>> I am thinking to use DETS and somehow introduce a very simple intermediate
>> layer that would offer the impression to be in a graph (each non-leaf node a
>> directory) and map it to the DETS key/value API.
>>
>> Any suggestions?
>>
>> thanks
>> marco
>>
>> [1] https://ninenines.eu/articles/ranch-ftp/
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