Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 27 Jan 1995 15:02:57 -0600 (CST)
From:      fredriks@mcs.com (Lars Fredriksen)
To:        jkh@freefall.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Cc:        hackers@freefall.cdrom.com
Subject:   Re: Am I dreaming?
Message-ID:  <m0rXxon-000Bk6C@mercury.mcs.com>
In-Reply-To: <199501271800.KAA23617@freefall.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jan 27, 95 10:00:56 am

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Jordan K. Hubbard writes:
> 
> Some may have noticed in the last snapshot that I'd created some seemingly
> bogus symlinks of the form:
> 
> lrwxrwxr-x  1 root  bin         54 Jan 27 00:39 packages -> ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/2.0-RELEASE/packages
> 
> Which are indeed bogus from the file point of view, but are at least
> informational and show you just where you should go to get the real file.
> Since the snaps are in an anon ftp area, I can't just point my symlinks
> off to other NFS locations due to the chroot'd nature of it all.
> 
> My question is, how hard would it be to make them MORE than informational?
> e.g. the system sees one of these URL specs as a filename and auto-fetches
> it for you.
> 
> I guess this all gets back to the whole `user mode translation of file names'
> thing we were talking about awhile back.  It's not the same as portals,
> which require a given mount point to be traversed, but rather affects all
> files who's names match some sort of selection criteria.  The feature above
> would be one very nice application for this.
> 
> Any comments?  Am I, as the subject says, simply dreaming?
> 
> 						Jordan
> 

It might be a dream, but a cool one at that. If you could live with
a symlink that looks like: flexfax --> /ftp::/sgi.com/..., then you 
could mount an ftp, http etc filesystem on /ftp, /http etc that would
do the trick. Now someone needs to write a ftp/http filesystem.

Lars


-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Lars Fredriksen		fredriks@mcs.com		(home)
			lars@fredriks.pr.mcs.net	(home-home)
			fredriks@asiago.cs.wisc.edu



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?m0rXxon-000Bk6C>