[ale] Mounting FTP?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Tue, 2006-12-05 at 22:12 -0500, Jeb Barger wrote:

> 
> Can I mount FTP? and how?
> 


It is possible to mount a surprising number of real (and not-so-real)
filesystems.  Check out the FUSE packages in Ubuntu, which permit
filesystem drivers to be written in userspace.  Once you've installed
the core FUSE packages on your system, you can check out the list of
Filesystems using FUSE to download userspace filesystem drivers.  It
appears that "ferrisfuse" is what you will want:

        libferris is a virtual filesystem that exposes various
        hierarchial data including: native (kernel disk IO with fam),
        XML (mount an XML file as a filesystem), DB4, xmldb, Evolution,
        Firefox, Emacs, LDAP, HTTP, FTP, eet, sockets, RDF/XML, RDF/bdb,
        and mbox.

I don't know how you would interact with some of those things (mounting
an XML file as a filesystem?), but it seems to do what you're looking
for as far as mount FTP as a filesystem.  libferris and ferrisfuse do
not appear to be available in any of the Ubuntu repositories that I am
aware of, but you can get it from that link above.

The FUSE utilities that I have on my system are:

fd0man at pepper:~[0]$ dpkg -l | grep -i fuse
ii  fuse-utils                                 2.5.3-2.1ubuntu4
Filesystem in USErspace (utilities)
ii  libfuse-dev                                2.5.3-2.1ubuntu4
Filesystem in USErspace (development files)
ii  libfuse2                                   2.5.3-2.1ubuntu4
Filesystem in USErspace library
ii  python-fuse                                2.5-4build1
Python bindings for FUSE (Filesystems in USE
fd0man at pepper:~[0]$ 

I'm not sure if you need all of them, you probably don't need the python
or the -dev packages, but I installed them all anyway.  I might
experiment with writing filesystem drivers in Python, myself, because
FreeBSD has an implementation of FUSE running on it now, too, and I
think it would be nice to have FUSE modules to provide common filesystem
support in a cross-platform fashion.  :-)


> Different question, same problem, I am running the lastest Ubuntu and in
> gnome under places (connect to server) it seems like I can create all
> sorts of mounts?  are they really mounts?  If so, where are the stored?



You can create these connections, but majority of them are not "real"
mounts; that is, they're not mounted in the Unix filesystem as you would
expect, so the kernel has no idea that these filesystems are there (and
that means that programs which do not use the GNOME VFS also are
ignorant of these mechanisms).  However, you can mount some of the
things that the "Connect to Server" option gives you by way of FUSE;
there is a FUSE module for that available in Ubuntu:

fd0man at pepper:~[0]$ apt-cache search fuse ssh
autossh - Automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels
sshfs - filesystem client based on SSH File Transfer Protocol
fd0man at pepper:~[0]$ 

The sshfs FUSE module just mount an SCP/SFTP session as a locally
accessible filesystem so that you don't have to do anything special to
work with it.

Isn't it amazing what computers can do these days?  :^)

--
Michael B. Trausch
                    fd0man at gmail.com
Phone: (404) 592-5746
                          Jabber IM:
                    fd0man at gmail.com
              fd0man at livejournal.com
Demand Freedom!  Use open and free protocols, standards, and software!
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