Thu May 23 12:13:58 1996
Brian Bershad (doc by Yasushi Saito)
Overview
Web file system(WFS from now on) is a
file system that
retrieves files from remote httpd server.
It may be slow because it provides no caching, and it sets up
TCP connection with the httpd server every time a file is being read.
The virtue of WFS is that it's simple, reliable, and easy to maintain.
Design and Implementation
It's an another kind of file system extension.
It defines FileSystem.T,
FileSystem.MountPoint
and File.T objects as usual,
In reponse to File.T.read(path) call, it sends out a
http request
GET /path
to the server specified when the file system in mounted.
Using the service
WFS is usually loaded via nanny, so
no special command is required to load it.
When WFS is loaded, it installs inself in the
name server.
To use the file system, you first have to mount it like below.
!>mount www.cs.washington.edu wfs /wfs
The first argument to mount specifies the remote httpd server
to which WFS send out requests.
Caveats
- It's read only.
- It doesn't support directory operations.
You can't do
ls.
yasushi@cs.washington.edu