A confluence of events has me thinking about data storage. A friend dropped me a note containing a proposal I can’t talk much about other than to say it was about storage; I have also been following a thread on the Open Darwin discussion list about mounting ftp-based stores as filesystems; and last of all I somehow wiped out this laptop’s disk layout and partitioning scheme, meaning I may never be able to reboot: backing up what I have became important.
Anyway, in the course of this, as I found myself making backups of my home directory and realizing that I have appletalk/IP, samba/cifs, and nfs all running here, I was reminded that they all require different incantations to make them work. In some case they’re unidirectional: UNIX, including OS X, can share appletalk but only OS X can mount appletalk volumes, while all of them can share and mount NFS filesystems. I haven’t tested samba, though I have mounted and written to samba shares from UNIX and Windows here.
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ad0s2a 128990 42774 75898 36% /
/dev/ad0s2f 257998 532 236828 0% /tmp
/dev/ad0s2g 7179502 3322530 3282612 50% /usr
/dev/ad0s2e 257998 228222 9138 96% /var
procfs 4 4 0 100% /proc
pink:/Network/iso 11642580 7373720 4268860 63% /mnt/tmp < - NFS mount from OS X
//PAUL@BLUE/PAUL 5853056 2595712 3257344 44% /mnt/smb <- samba mount from FreeBSD
//PAUL@RED/PAUL 7302272 5239424 2062848 72% /mnt/red <- samba mount from FreeBSD
Wouldn't it be easier if there was a super-command (like attach?) that could automagically determine what protocols were available between host A and B and just handle the mounting of the filesystem? You could prioritize it, of course: hosts connecting from some networks might connect with appletalk or samba, while others might be offered ftp only.
OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) offers this as a feature: "Mount ftp servers directly in Finder", and here is a mention of mount_ftp and ftp.fs possibly being present in Jaguar. Get your advance orders in now . . .
KDE offers something like this but I've never used it. I may try it now to see how close I am to what they have.