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

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

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