Anyone have any experience using the 9p protocol for file sharing?
Posted by tidux@reddit | linuxadmin | View on Reddit | 2 comments
The entire first and only page of Google results for "v9pfs linux" are in Chinese, which I don't speak.
EDIT: here is the 9p daemon (also in Debian-main for Wheezy and later).
It works remarkably well, only requiring a single open TCP port, which also means you can tunnel it over SSH for over-the-wire encryption trivially.
On the client side you need mount -t 9p, the 9p.ko kernel module, and about five minutes to read the documentation. It even handles NAT traversal and dropped-connection recovery better than NFS. I have a new favorite filesystem network protocol. Now I just need to get diod running on Illumos and I will have achieved Maximum Unix Hipster.
EDIT2: 9p is a cleartext protocol, so your best bet is tunneling it over OpenVPN or similar. Attempts to do it over SSH have proven supremely fussy when NAT is involved.
EDIT3: setup here
xtavras@reddit
offtopic: maybe I do something wrong but I only get ~2,5Mb/s with rsync on local mount (w/o authentication too) and ~10 Mb/s with rsync over ssh on the same remote server.
denzuko@reddit
Very offtopic, but rsync over ssh is just serializing the rsync session, with tls and gzip already engaged, and holding the tunnel open.
Rsync over a mount encounters the nfs, kernel, and userspace overheads in addition to the overhead of rsync.