file managers [LWN.net]

file managers

Posted Feb 27, 2007 1:58 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: file managers by rfunk
Parent article: New KDE 4 preview shows progress (Linux.com)

Yep.

If all I used was KDE or Gnome then I wouldn't have much of a problem with using those desktop-specific items, but I tend to use stuff all over the map.

My current favorite is sshfs. It's purpose is essentially the same thing as your sftp kio-slave (isn't that 'fish://"?)

I wanted to use it to host a lot of files so I tested the stability and speed of the thing vs NFS vs Samba vs iSCSI (OpenIscsi initiator, "iSCSI Enterprise Target" for the target) vs ATA over Ethernet (both a kernel based virtual plane and a userspace one, don't remember much about it)

Keep in mind that I did this some months ago, also it was fairly informal and I just used the defaults given to me by the various debian packages. Software vblade for AoE was uninspiring and I quickly dropped that.

I tested for file transfer speed and stability. So I did my best with very large files, multiple gigs, so that there was no file system cache issues. Then I ran Bonnie++ on all of them to see how well they performed.

Samba was by far the slowest. Simply outclassed.
NFS was fine, but on 100Mb/s network Fuse-based SshFS was actually continously faster, it wasn't until I got a new switch and bumped the network speed up to 1Gb/s until NFS edged ahead. Of course iSCSI was effecient and provided best performance and compatability due to the fact that I ran Ext3 on it (extended attributes and ACL support and all that).

I think, if I remember correctly, that NFS did do random access much faster then anybody else. The downsides to sshfs is things like not handling ACLs or being able to handle special file types like named pipes, but that's not that important just for desktop file sharing.

Then if your dealing with mostly text files over a slower network (say wireless) then how attractive is the compression option for ssh? (very)
Play media files, edit files, run programs over sshfs. About anything you'd want, no sweat.

Nowadays Openssh is the only network service that runs on my machines at home. It's all I ever need.

The major gotcha with sshfs is that the stability of the FS is determined by the quality of the ssh server. Of course, recent versions of OpenSSH are superior to all else.

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ssh as network filesystem

Posted Feb 27, 2007 2:07 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

Yeah, having learned system/network administration on NFS-heavy networks, I've learned
to avoid it whenever possible, and ssh is a great protocol for that. Thus sftp://. :-)

sftp:// and fish:// are different. fish:// uses shell commands, while sftp:// uses sshd's sftp
subsystem extension (there's a switch for it in the OpenSSHd config file). sftp is
noticably faster, but slightly less well-supported across different ssh servers.

I definitely intend to do some more with sshfs soon.

Random access?

Posted Feb 27, 2007 7:19 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

How can sshfs (and other similar FS'es over a file transfer protocol) do random access at all? The FAQ you linked to in your followup did not answer this. Do they just copy a file back and forth? I guess this works for small files, but is infeasible for very large ones, and those are precisely the ones where random access is most useful.

About pipes on desktop, some programs do create them in the user's home directory. Wine is one.

Random access?

Posted Feb 27, 2007 10:15 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The SSH_FXP_READ and SSH_FXP_WRITE messages take an offset and length: see the secsh-filexfer* standards.

sftp rides atop ssh, but it is *not* equivalent to stuff you can do by pounding on the shell (unlike scp).

That's why it's a subsystem and not just another client command.

Random access?

Posted Feb 27, 2007 20:26 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I wouldn't considure Sshfs as a replacement for NFS or SMB (it would probably fall appart for large numbers of users) and I wouldn't use it for a home directory, but I think it makes a very convienent and clever way file transfers for personal use.