Re: [9fans] How to implement a moral equivalent of automounter in Plan9?

["Roman V. Shaposhnik" <rvs@sun.com>]

On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 16:18 -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:31 PM, Roman V. Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com> wrote:
> > In Plan9 land you don't need automounter to deal with
> > /media/floppy. But cd /net/<machine name> is not there.
> > At least not by default.
>
> I see what you're after.  If that's all you want, though, I have to
> confess I don't see how it would be too hard to implement.  You could
> just write a shim filesystem that would sit on top of /net and monitor
> walk's and handle importing and mounting for you.  If you followed a
> simple convention of always referring to a filesystem as, say,
> '/a/<machine>' then it wouldn't require any configuration at all.
> Hell, you could probably even implement it as a shell script.
>
> What's not there, aside from the program itself, of course?

I totally agree that a shim filesystem whould solve an immediate issues
perfectly. The solution, however, will be a 'black box'. If I mount
such a filesystem under /n/ all I would see in my name space is a single
mount. Everything that goes on underneath /n/<name>/stuff... will be
completely hidden from me inside the namespace of the shim fileserver
itself.

I'm not sure whether it is an artifact of me spending lots of time under
Solaris inside a pretty well managed Sun's intranet, but I do appreciate
the fact that every time I access something like:
   /set/tools/gcc/4.0/intel-S2
I actually have a total transparency of where this thing came from. All
I need to do in order to find out is:
   $ mount | fgrep /set/tools/gcc/4.0/intel-S2
and then I can manipulate my namespace even further to suit my needs.

Now, the only [meta]question I have lest for this list at this point is:
am I unique in appreciating something like the above? Do you think I'd
better off with a shim-like approach instead (where /set would be
managed 100% by a single fileserver hiding all the details from me)?

Thanks,
Roman.