[tahoe-dev] Use Tahoe as a real-time distributed file system?

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Shawn Willden <shawn at willden.org> wrote: > > There are some FUSE modules that provide access to Tahoe through a standard > file system, but their quality is not high and there are some limitations. I don't entirely agree. Shawn is probably thinking of the these files in contrib/fuse/: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/trunk/contrib It is true they are unsupported and probably don't work. I'm going to remove them from the Tahoe-LAFS source repository (ticket #1409). But that doesn't mean that there is no high-quality integration into your local filesystem! The SFTP support that comes with Tahoe-LAFS is of high quality. It was developed according to our standard procedures: developed under complete unit tests, designed for reproducibility, written by a very skilled hacker (David-Sarah Hopwood), subjected to peer review, and manually tested by our loyal users who report problems into our issue tracker. But, is a high quality SFTP server sufficient for high-quality integration into your local filesystem? I'm not sure. On Linux: As far as a browser interface, as soon as you run the SFTP server, then you get full browsing, drag-and-drop, etc. with Nautilus (or any other tool that uses GVFS [1]) or Dolphin (or any other tool that uses KIO [2]). See also Cyberduck, below. For filesystem integration, you can mount the SFTP server into your filesystem with sshfs [3]. On Mac OS X: For a browser, there are a zillion proprietary FTP clients for Mac OS X which give you graphical browsing, drag-and-drop, etc., and in addition they offer "keep this directory synchronized", which I haven't tried but which sounds like Dropbox-style functionality to me. There are also a few Free/Open apps, the most highly recommended of which is Cyberduck [4], which also works on Windows and Linux. For filesystem integration, you can mount the SFTP server into your filesystem with sshfs. Plus, there is a tool named Macfusion [5] which puts a more Mac-flavored GUI on top of FUSE. On Windows: For a browser/synchronizer (a la Dropbox?) you can use tools like the aforementioned Cyberduck. For filesystem integration there seem to be two Free/Open options: Swish [6], and Dokan [7]. (Thanks to Frederick Braun for trying out swish just now and reporting on the Tahoe-LAFS IRC channel that it worked.) By the way, the SFTP feature was supported by a generous contribution from Jack Lloyd [8] who offered a $150 bounty. That, combined with the $800 bounty offered by Ed Pimentl [9] motivated David-Sarah to do the hard work for implementing a high-quality SFTP interface. Thanks again, Jack Lloyd! Dear Ed Pimentl: you offered $800 if someone would do this work. Is there anything insufficient about what David-Sarah has done? Regards, Zooko [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GVFS [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIO [3] http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html [4] http://cyberduck.ch [5] http://macfusionapp.org [6] http://swish-sftp.org [7] http://dokan-dev.net/en [8] http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-February/003807.html [9] http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-February/003802.html http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409# remove contrib/fuse