fuse-iso and remote named pipes for GSOC

[Cesar Izurieta]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 3:42 AM, Kai Blin <kai.blin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 26 March 2008 02:24:35 Cesar Izurieta wrote:
>  > Besides the FUSE project for GSOC I see two items listed on the
>  > http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode page:
>  >
>  > # Better ISO FUSE file system integration
>
>  Steven already took care of this part, so I'll wrap up the next one.
>
>
>  > # A FUSE wrapper for remote named pipes using libsmbclient
>
>  The goal of this is to be able to do RPC via Windows named pipes to remote
>  machines. Of course the best solution would be to just use libsmbclient from
>  Wine directly, but libsmbclient is under the GPL and Wine is under the LGPL,
>  so that's not going to work.
>
>  So the obvious idea is some solution where we can use libsmbclient for what we
>  need without having to link to libsmbclient. FUSE can provide this
>  abstraction.
>
>  The idea would be to create a pipe subdirectory of WINEPREFIX and mount our
>  pipefs there. Accessing pipe/server/pipename should connect to
>  \\server\pipe\pipename, if possible.
>  One more thing that needs to be supported is mode switching on the named pipe.

Implementing such a filesystem doesn't seem difficult at all.
libsmbclient contains all that is needed and we would only need to map
some samba structs to fuse structs. The only real problem that I see
is authentication. If we want to use this as a regular filesystem we
could mount one pipefs per connection (with authentication information
on connect) or provide login and domain information in the path itself
(doesn't sound like a good idea)

>
>  I'd suggest to read up on remote named pipes to get a better idea what they're
>  used for.
>
>  If you've got any more questions, I'm happy to help.
>  Kai
>
>  --
>  Kai Blin
>  WorldForge developer  http://www.worldforge.org/
>  Wine developer        http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin
>  Samba team member     http://www.samba.org/samba/team/
>  --
>  Will code for cotton.
>