mapping [process|socket|...] to Filesystem

[Gary Corcoran]

Richard Kästner wrote:
> On Monday 02 January 2006 22:29, Björn König wrote:
> 
>>Richard Kästner schrieb:
>>
>>>Hello,
>>>
>>>hope to find some help, hints and experience here:
>>>
>>>an external device expects commands and command data,
>>>it produces result-codes and result data.
>>>Communication is done via HTTP (and working)
>>>
>>>The idea is, to allow access via Samba, which requires either
>>>implementation of Samba - VFS modules or mapping to BSD-Filesystem -
>>>pseudofs came to my mind.
>>>[...]
>>
>>Hello,
>>
>>your description is a little bit vague to me, but it sounds like that
>>this task can be probably done by using portalfs. See mount_portalfs(8)
>>for examples.
>>
>>Regards Björn
> 
> Björn,
> (sorry for being vague - I seem to be too deep in my problems)
> 
> thanks for the tip - portalfs was the first thing to try, but it does not work 
> with samba (at least the way, I wanted ):
> Portalfs does not allow to pass anything besides '/p/tcp/localhost/6666'
> 
> To be less vague :
> the external device is a black box, communicates via ???-HTTP server.
> 
> The idea is:
> - a (windows)user copies a file to a directory (say: .../commands/xyz),
> - there is a "thing", that maps this file to some activity towards external
>   box (similar to: procfs_doprocnote )
> - as a response, a file appears in another file (.../response/data), 
>   which can be read from (windows)client ( similar to: procfs_doproccmdline)
> - the whole stuff should work diskless 
> - response data can be from a few bytes up to several megabyte
> 
> 
> - if I can manage, I could export this filesystem via samba _and_ nfs ...
> 
> - if it all was only about acces to the black box, it could be done via 
> HTTP ... unfortunately, I have to deal with windows clients

I'm just curious: why can't the windows clients just use Firefox (or
any other browser) to access the black box?  You can download files
(e.g. results) with a browser...

Gary