TNFS - The Trivial Network Filesystem (Qt6 System Tray Edition)

This fork modernizes the classic TNFS daemon by wrapping it in a lightweight, cross-platform Qt6 System Tray Application. It makes managing and monitoring your retro-computing file server incredibly simple without needing to run terminal commands.

New Qt6 GUI Features

• System Tray Integration: Run the server quietly in the background on Windows, Linux, or macOS.
• One-Click Start/Stop: Easily toggle the server on and off directly from the tray menu.
• Live Console: View server logs, mounting events, and errors in real-time via the built-in log window.
• Settings UI: Configure your root mount directory and stats output path without editing text files.
• Safe Port Management: Built-in network socket checking ensures the app fails gracefully with a UI warning if port 16384 is already in use.

Note for Windows Users: Windows 11 often hides new system tray icons by default. If you launch the app and don't see the TNFS badge, you can force it to stay visible via Windows Settings. Go to Settings > Personalization > Taskbar, expand the Other system tray icons section, and toggle TnfsTrayApp.exe to On.

Usage Statistics

This fork includes a built-in usage logger.

• Data: All mounts and file opens are logged to tnfsd_stats.csv in the server directory.
• Format: Timestamp, IP_Address, Filename
• Dashboard: A Python script (gen_stats.py) is included to generate a visual HTML report of server activity.

To run the dashboard:

1. Generate stats: python3 gen_stats.py
2. Serve web page: python3 -m http.server 8080

Rationale

Protocols such as NFS (Unix) or SMB (Windows) are overly complex for 8-bit systems. While NFS is well documented, it's a complex RPC based protocol. SMB is much worse. It is also a complex RPC based protocol, but it's also proprietary, poorly documented, and implementations differ so much that to get something that works with a reasonable subset of SMB would add a great deal of unwanted complexity. The Samba project has been going for years and they still haven't finished making it bug-for-bug compatible with the various versions of Windows!

At the other end, there's FTP, but FTP is not great for a general file system protocol for 8-bit systems - it requires two TCP sockets for each connection, and some things are awkward in FTP, even if they work.

So instead, TNFS provides a straightforward protocol that can easily be implemented on most 8-bit systems. It's designed to be a bit better than FTP for the purpose of a filesystem, but not as complex as the "big" network filesystem protocols like NFS or SMB. It is also designed to be usable with 'incomplete' TCP/IP stacks (e.g. ones that only support UDP).

Security

This is not intended to be a proper, secure network file system. If you're storing confidential files on your vintage systems, you're barmy :) Encryption, for example, is not supported. However, servers that may be exposed to the internet should be coded in such a way they won't open up the host system to exploits.

Supported systems

So far, the following 8-bit systems have a TNFS client available:

• Sinclair ZX Spectrum (with the Spectranet)
• Atari 8-bit (with the FujiNet)
• Coleco Adam (with the FujiNet)
• Tandy (with the FujiNet)
• Apple II (with the FujiNet)
• Commodore 64 (with the FujiNet)

Supported server systems

The TNFS daemon has been built and tested via CMake and Qt6 for the following systems:

• Linux
• Microsoft Windows
• Mac OS X and successors

Acknowledgements

The FujiNet team, for many improvements and enhancements to the basic TNFS daemon. See https://fujinet.online