Bug 104

Summary: [WISHLIST] sftpfs?
Product: Portable OpenSSH Reporter: Joshua Ginsberg <rainman>
Component: sftpAssignee: OpenSSH Bugzilla mailing list <openssh-bugs>
Status: CLOSED INVALID    
Severity: enhancement CC: rainman
Priority: P2    
Version: -current   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   

Description Joshua Ginsberg 2002-02-05 18:46:21 AEDT 
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
Comment 1 Markus Friedl 2002-02-07 06:54:57 AEDT 
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 :)
Comment 2 Dan Kaminsky 2002-02-07 14:43:17 AEDT 
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
Comment 3 Damien Miller 2004-04-14 12:24:17 AEST 
Mass change of RESOLVED bugs to CLOSED