From: css <cs...@sw...> - 2007-08-20 22:35:17
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Since I was searching for a working Method of porting or at least accessing FUSE-Filesystems on Windows for half a year and didnt find anything useful so far except many trials and reports on "projects" which all were not ready to use, I decided to follow the simple Idea of making a "fuse-proxy", i.e. a system which provides the contents of a mounted fs via some file transmission protocol per loopback (I am not the first person who tries this). I set up a small virtual Debian on a QEMU running on windows, being able to mount fuse-filesystems inside it. First I tried to let it run Samba, but I couldnt make Windows recognizing it. Then I decided to use WebDav, at the moment using apache and mod_dav. Well, except the fact that .DAV-Directories with the Meta-Information from WebDav are created (which is easy to turn off by some apache-configuration or simply use another WebDav-Server, or simply by deleting them), and some overhead related to WebDav, this works fine. Yes, it may be experimental, it may be quick-and-dirty, but it works. It works *now*, I am not just expecting it to work soon (like the many other projects i have found so far), it works now. I managed to shrink the disk-image with the Debian to 92 Megabytes, which was small enough for my purposes. I know that the idea of using a vm to do this is old. But I didnt find any "ready" disk-image or even a howto or so. What I needed was something I could give to others - i.e. a Linux specialized for this purposes which was as small as possible. Using a vm has also the benefit that there is no need to port the many existing fuse-filesystems, which use *n*x-specific stuff, which can be used on windows only in cygwin, if anyway (using a libc-hook with some file-accessing-functions which understands fuse-filesystems in cygwin and linking some small ftp-servers against it was my first approach but had many unexpected problems). Ok, now the reason for writing this to this mailinglist is - as I said, for my purposes this was enough, it was working, i had anything i needed to do in batchfiles and shellscripts - but it can still be improved by setting up a smaller linux-image and some proper interfaces, a daemon mode and to give speed-improvements - things which can easily be done but take time. So my question is, if this - a specialized linux-image for mounting fuse-filesystems on a virtual machine - is of use for anyone, and if anyone wants to help setting it up and making it more "comfortable" under windows, or if something like this already "officially" exists (i wouldnt be surprised)? If noone else has use of it or so I will stop working on it. Greetings CSS |