From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: dexen deVries <dexen.devries@gmail.com>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2011 16:13:17 +0200
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	<201104281435.56658.dexen.devries@gmail.com>
	<20110428140053.GA8340@skaro.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk>
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Message-Id: <201104281613.17687.dexen.devries@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [9fans] portable filesystem (was: spaces in filenames (and
	filesystems...))
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On Thursday 28 of April 2011 16:00:53 Digby Tarvin wrote:
> > at some point i had that crazy idea to have a pendrive formatted in ext3
> > or nilfs2, with small auxiliary partition with a virtual machine -- and
> > use the virtual machine as a filesystem server when on hostile OS.
>=20
> Not a bad idea, but you probably want an intelligent device able to
> run the virtual machine itself (in which case it isnt really virtual),
> otherwise you are limited to hostile os's with virtual machine support.
>=20
> Perhaps a file server on a wireless or usb equipped smart phone...
> I have a small wireless hotspot that also can serve files from an
> optional MicroSD.

funny thing, my current pendrive (which really is nokia n900 phone) has=20
abundance of powerful hardware -- cpu, ram and 32GB + microSD block storage=
=2E=20
you got me fantasizing.

9p served over usb (either directly, as mentioned recently in somebody's po=
st=20
about registering usb ids), or over tcp/ip over usb would be cool. if only=
=20
various OSes interfaced with that easily.

another silly, but perhaps doable, approach could be to make the phone serv=
e=20
either ext2/ext3 or fat, translated on-the-fly from whatever's the underlyi=
ng=20
fs. as in, the (say) fat would not reside literally on the device, but=20
relevant parts would be generated on-demand by the phone in its ram and=20
presented as a blockdevice over usb mass storage proto.

in a way, a reverse of typical p9 fileserver -- read files, serve filesyste=
m=20
image.


um, how crazy is that?


=2D-=20
dexen deVries

[[[=E2=86=93][=E2=86=92]]]

``In other news, STFU and hack.''
mahmud, in response to Erann Gat's ``How I lost my faith in Lisp''
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3D2308816