Re: Stateless SFTP server and READDIR race condition.

[Michael Closson <closson%cs.ualberta.ca@localhost>]

On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 21:24 -0500, Nicolas Williams wrote:
> SFTP needs to decide whether it's a filesystem protocol or a file
> transfer protocol.  Then we can figure out what to do about state
> recovery across reboots, partitions, etc.  A file transfer protocol
> shouldn't really care about such failures, whereas a filesystem protocol
> kinda has to.

Yes, I see your point.

Readers of this group may be interested in what people are doing with
ssh and sftp.

My research group at the U of Alberta is involved in a Grid-like project
(i.e., Globus/OGSA).  Basically, we want to be able to easily aggregate
multiple HPC (High Performance Computing) systems at the user-level
(also non-root level).  A typical use case goes something like this:  A
researcher has ssh access to multiple clusters (probably administered by
different groups and there fore no shared file system), and they want to
load-balance some jobs across these clusters.  So, we need a nice way to
ship job data back and forth.  We have an overlay file system that
presents global view of these multiple systems to application programs.
This overlay file system uses SFTP on the back end.  On the front end
(i.e., the interposition agent) we have NFS, Samba, FUSE and a library
that exports a POSIX api (open(), read(), etc.)




Mike