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Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2003 8:26 am Post subject: GEOM Gate.

saw this in the freebsd-hackers mailing list today.. looks really cool.. GEOM gate basically allows you to mount a drive from across the network.

Quote:

Message: 4
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 14:47:47 +0200
From: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <nick@garage.freebsd.pl>
Subject: GEOM Gate.
To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Cc: phk@phk.freebsd.dk
Message-ID: <20031014124747.GQ520@garage.freebsd.pl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2"

Hello hackers...

Ok, GEOM Gate is ready for testing.
For those who don't know what it is, they can read README:

http://garage.freebsd.pl/geom_gate.README

and presentation from WIP/BSDCon03 session:

http://garage.freebsd.pl/GEOM_Gate.pdf

After compliation (cd geom_gate; make; make install) you should run
regression tests:

# regression/runtests.sh

If everything will went ok you can play with GEOM Gate and report any bugs.

I've spend some time to made GEOM Gate force-remove-safe so using
'-f' option with ggc(8) should be always safe.

Ah! Four manual pages are added, so feel free to read them first
(gg(4), geom_gate(4), ggc(8), ggd(8))

http://garage.freebsd.pl/geom_gate.tbz

Enjoy!

Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2003 4:29 am Post subject:

Why, oh why did they not start with UDP from scratch is beyond me? Still, anything to replace NFS and you'll get props from me... Smile

Interesting, I'll have to keep tabs on it!!!

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

cause udp isn't always an option. Beside i don't thing you would want to use udp of a bad strip of internet

Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2003 6:44 am Post subject:

i've been tracking this guys work for a little over a year now.. he's got some really good projects on his site.. I really like his project on jailing specific ssh users.. Though you need to do some editing of the diff files to get it to work right now days.. But he always impresses me.

Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2003 7:01 am Post subject:

csign wrote:
cause udp isn't always an option. Beside i don't thing you would want to use udp of a bad strip of internet

Well, whenever the routed protocol is TCP/IP UDP is an option (unless it is filtered by some obscure ACL's that your friendly network engineer has put in place). So, in all generality I don't see why you wouldn't use it. TCP is far too flow (because of layer 3 overhead in packet headers) for a network file system. I don't think the developers meant to mount drives over a public network with this software. For one, it would be all plaintext as encryption would slow any usefullness of this down to a crawl so any information would be vulnerable to prying eyes. UDP can be resiliant to errors, however checks need to be done in software for this (higher layer of OSI). Take TFTP for example... Any error correction is done at the session layer (5 of OSI) I do believe and it blows FTP out of the water in terms of data transfer speeds.

In any regards, I hope their project goes towards UDP and brings about a much needed replacement for NFS!

Soup, what type of environment are you using this in? I am curious if you are using it as a replacement for NFS or for some other reason. Smile

Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2003 7:23 am Post subject:

My enviroments consists os a Mac G3, 2 FreeBSD 5.1 1 Dual boot FreeBSD 5.1/OpenBSD 3.3 and windows 2000 for games.

I'm not using NFS but thought i would share the project..

As for encription of the GEOM gate, There's always IPSEC and Stunnel to provide the extra bit of security if interested.

But i would like to test this out on a VPN to do some comparison benchmarks. Perhaps one day i'll do that but i think i'll wait awhile. after all they just proposed this idea at BSDCON. So it's far too early in developement at this point. but over time it will make a much needed replacement for NFS. But for the developers to commit something like this it will take time.. I'm still waiting on a commit on PF. I would love to see it kernel level and not kldload kernel modules.

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

Isn't it so that UDP sucks over adsl

Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2003 1:10 pm Post subject:

Soup: Thanks for the insight... Good call on PF. Daniel Hartmeier rocks!!!

Csign: Was that a question? I have not ever seen any issues with UDP and ADSL. ADSL consists more of network layer transport... Although there is some funky PPPoE that gets tied in. I'm not an ADSL expert, so I guess I can't be of much assistance...

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

Sucks as in is as slow as tcp