Re: [9fans] p9 file server (npfs) w/ authentication from heterogenous systems

[Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 7:44 AM, Jakob Praher <jp@hapra.at> wrote:
>
> I have read a post from Eric Van Hensbergen about paravirtualized
> filesystems. This was of interest to me, and I tried to pull npfs from
> subversion. As a client I am using the 9pfuse to mount the tree of the
> npfs server. Is this a good match, or should I use something from the
> npfs tree directly? Is npfs the best choice if I would like to export
> ufs like filesystems?
>

If you are on Linux you can use v9fs directly.
For servers there are lots of choices, but spfs/npfs are the only ones
(I know of) which support the UNIX extensions (for things like UID
mapping, etc.)
There is a comprehensive list: http://9p.cat-v.org/implementations

>
> My biggest issue is that I can only do read operations on the client.
> How can I set up something like a basic authenticated connection. Just
> to get the uid over to the npfs in order to act as the right user on
> the server? I read a bit about factotum, yet I am not sure given the
> npfs that it supports it...
>

This all depends on what you are trying to do, are you going
Linux<->Linux, Linux<->Plan9, something else?  Authentication isn't
currently supported by any of the UNIX servers (to my knowledge).  It
is possible to setup an authenticated connection from UNIX to Plan 9
using p9p.

        -eric