suprasummus / franken-fs

Network file system sewed up from individual organs

Franken-FS

Network block device sewed up from individual organs. Filthy experiment.

It's almost identical to NBD, except it's modular.

Components:

• netcat (GNU version) -- to shift data across the internet.
• openssl -- to make transmitted data resistant to the bad touch, that can happen in the vasts of the network.
• pblock (pblock-bd, pblock-srv) -- to forge sequential stream of data into random access blob.
• pgspawn + bash + socat -- to glue layers together.

What about speed?

Performance is not exactly stunning. (Benhmark done on Intel Atom processor, eMMC storage.)

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/nbd0 bs=50M count=1 oflag=direct
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
52428800 bytes (52 MB, 50 MiB) copied, 19.4377 s, 2.7 MB/s

Is this production ready?

Bro, of course not! Mainly I've got little trust for pblock part of the stack.

TODOs:

• Openssl is misconfigured. Certificates are self-signed, server accepts all connections, and client will connect to anything.
• I'm searching for something more robust than openssl. I was unable to make it work with external transport, like netcat. Openssl just insists on creating it's own server using TCP/IP stack. No way to force it to use existing socket.

Quick guide

To setup example connection, run setup script

./setup.sh

Before starting client, you need nbd kernel module loaded:

modprobe nbd

Running server is just easy. Running server is just hard and it requires root.

If you need to tweak settings, you have to modify pgspawn scripts. Unfortunately.

Licensing

Pls help me with that. I'm no lawyer. I wanna the code MIT, but can i do this? Some parts are GPL-ish.