From owner-freebsd-hackers  Sat Mar 10  3:15:24 2001
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Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2001 03:15:15 -0800
From: Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>
To: hackers@FreeBSD.org
Cc: fs@FreeBSD.org
Subject: httpfs
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A few of us were talking on IRC tonight about how cool it would be to
have an httpfs filesystem -- then it occurred to me we almost have
this already, in the form of the (under-utilised) portalfs.  Portalfs
works by handing off everything to a userland daemon which handles the
actual transaction request, so you could easily imagine extending it
to provide an http method similar to the tcp method it currently has
for initiating tcp connections.

One could probably make this more generic and finish implementing the
undocumented 'exec' method (which currently exists as a stub): this
would run an administrator-specified command (i.e. fixed in
/etc/portal.conf) and pipe the output back to the user.

A fully navigable httpfs (e.g. one you can ls and cd around in) is
more work and probably requires a full stacking layer, but this would
still be pretty cool.

Is anyone feeling inspired to implement this? :-)

Kris

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