Re: [9fans] cdrom floppy tape etc, media mount point

[Jack Johnson <fragment@nas.com>]

>>thus, having done:
>>
>>	autodir /n
>>
>>you can do, say:
>>
>>	mount /srv/factotum /n/bletheridoo

I was thinking about this last night on the drive home.

Though I realize things will probably change with the new fileserver, I 
was thinking about how to get dump functionality from venti as-is.  It 
occurred to me that one should be able to do something like:

vac -svf $home/vac/`{date -n} -h ventiserver /n/hullabaloo

run via cron, then have a variation on autodirfs that rebuilds the 
directory trees dump-style (or some custom style: 2002/Feb/20) based on 
the contents of $home/vac, and calls vacfs when traversing to the 
appropriate date.

(tangent ahead -- leave while you can)

My mind then started wandering to a coat-check style Web service where 
you'd post a file or set of files and vac would return a "ticket" so you 
could retrieve it later.  Maybe your resume that you only use once a 
decade, or some file you'd like to share with friends that lies 
somewhere in between needing security and being public information.

It also reminded me of the work done at PARC with small handheld devices 
called PARCTABs that have minimal storage, running much like a Plan 9 
terminal.  One thing I remember reading about them is that they were 
designed so people could treat them as if they had storage, so you could 
drag documents to the Tab, walk down the hall and copy them to another 
workstation, workboard, etc.  In reality, the data never moved, but the 
representation of the data behaved as if it did, just like icons for 
files on a local hard drive.

The part that makes me smile the most in Sean's paper is where he says, 
"For a user, it appears that vac compresses any amount of data down to 
45 bytes."  I think my wristwatch will hold 45 bytes.  I can only 
imagine how many vac fingerprints a cell phone could hold.  Where vac 
fingerprints are more powerful than PARCTABs, in my opinion, is that 
they're not tied to the network, per se.  Fingerprints can be stored on 
flash media and popped in a pocket, written on a 3x5 index card and 
dropped in the mail, kept on a USB keychain, sent via pager, etc.

With a vacfs port to Inferno and the Inferno IE plug-in (or vacfs 
support like WebDAV), you might be able to utilize vac URLs like 
vac://hullabaloo/64daefaecc4df4b5cb48a368b361ef56012a4f46.  I think it 
would/will be fun to experiment with vac fingerprints as tickets for 
data using extremely small, cheap devices or Web interfaces or 
combinations of the two, along the same lines as Sean's idea of 
implementing SFSRO on top of venti.

All of this, of course, for read-only data.

I also wonder if there might be a convenient way to do chaffing and 
winnowing using a venti archive, given the amalgam of blocks.

Sorry for the blather.  I'm prone to it.

-Jack