Mail Archives: cygwin/2006/02/24/20:07:11
David Vergin wrote:
> This conversation:
> http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/freenx-knx/2005-December/002725.html
> suggests that someone is working on getting this running in cygwin. But
> I can't find any follow-up.
I wouldn't get your hopes up. I certainly haven't seen anyone mention
any such thing around here, and doing something like that would be a
very major undertaking to say the least.
> otherwise directly accessing a remote filesystem located on a linux
> server? I've tried to think up some cute ssh-tunneling trick, but my
> head can't get there from here.
>
> I did see a few suggestions about doing the mount-remote-fs in Win XP
> and then accessing *that* from cygwin, but I couldn't dope out how to do
> that either.
The problem here is that Cygwin is not a kernel. It is just a
user-space library. So even if you were able to "mount" a remote
filesystem using something like this it would be a complete fiction that
only exists in the eyes of programs compiled against cygwin1.dll. It
would not exist to normal windows applications, Explorer, mingw
applications, etc. That might be useful if all you use are 100% cygwin
binaries but not very useful in the general case.
So as you mentioned it would be a lot better to simply mount the remote
filesystem using native windows methods and then access it using
Cygwin. And there are a number of ways you can do this, some of them
involving ssh. Since you can just use ssh's port forwarding features,
anything that runs over a socket can go over a ssh session. In a
previous life I tried a variation of this with a remote freebsd system,
running Samba, tunneled over the internet using PPTP (which includes
encryption.) The result was that the remote freebsd share was mounted
in windows as a regular drive letter. But I quickly abandoned this plan
because it was painfully slow. Using an editor with built-in sftp file
editing turned out to be so much simpler and faster than trying to
actually mount the files.
Brian
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