Would it be possible to look into the creation of an filesystem based on the sftp client/server? 1) For paranoid networks where portblocking is enabled on everything but http, sftp, and ssh, it would be ideal for sharing files. 2) For those wishing to create a simple means of VPN, an sftpfs would provide an ideal secure p2p file sharing method. 3) Samba was able to create a filesystem on top of a client/server architecture, so the concept doesn't seem too unreasonable. Any comments? -jag
yes, the sftp-server protocol is like a filesystem protocol, so this shouldn't be hard. doing things in unix will be harder than with plan9, but it's not impossible. however, i don't think this has something to do with openssh :)
If I remember right, it didn't seem too hard to adapt smbfs/smbmount to operate over SSH. I'll document this later, even if it only works on Linux. For Windows, smb connections are portlocked to 139, but an intermediary system on one subnet can expose systems on another. There's a project, nbfw(netbios forward), that allows some pretty large scale windows networking forwarding. Again, I'll be documenting this later. The real problem is that there's no simple/cross platform VFS subsystem that doesn't require serious kernel knowledge to interface with. There *are* some interesting systems that we could try to interface sftp with, but in the end, fixing client side VFS isn't our domain. --Dan
Mass change of RESOLVED bugs to CLOSED