Gmail as pendrive!?

D

Duster

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
May 4, 2002
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thought you might find this intrusting...

richard.jones said:
GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail.

GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename. This means that you can use all your favourite unix command line tools to operate on files stored on Gmail (e.g. cp, ls, mv, rm, ln, grep etc. etc.).
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here is the link


 
The Portable Virtual Privacy Machine

Carry your entire Internet communication system on a tiny USB drive.

Contains a complete virtual Linux machine with privacy-enabled Open Source Internet applications.

Carry your Internet applications, email, bookmarks, history, web cookies, download files in your pocket.
Perfect for travellers - nothing to be scanned, started, poked, or prodded at the airport.
Get English keyboard support no matter what computer you use.

No installation needed - just plug the drive into any Windows or Linux computer, and click on the Virtual Privacy Machine icon and you're ready to go.
The VPM's network connection will auto configure and run seamlessly on any machine with a working internet connection..

All Internet session data (cookies, history, downloads, etc.) are stored on the VPM, not the host computer.
Runs on any rewriteable media (USB drives, Flash Memory cards, Secure Digital devices, iPods, etc.)
This PR1 release runs on Windows and Linux - final release version will also run on OS X.
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just might be in the front page tommrow :p
GmailFS might be too ;)
 
just might be in the front page tommrow
GmailFS might be too
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Wow, I hope that was some sincere sarcasm. Both of these technologies were posted on Slashdot at least 6 months ago.
 
i don't ready slashdot like i do here... put i never saw them there... but hey i miss lots of things


 
ashmedai said:
Yes, but is it bootable?
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very very very very doubtfull...how are you going to boot onto an internet "drive" if you have no way to get onto the internet (on bootup)
 
BollWeevil said:
Wow, I hope that was some sincere sarcasm. Both of these technologies were posted on Slashdot at least 6 months ago.
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cool stuff is cool stuff
sometime you lead sometimes you lag
 
well Id run it by your sysadmin as it does VPN tunnel (at least my link)
 
cell_491 said:
very very very very doubtfull...how are you going to boot onto an internet "drive" if you have no way to get onto the internet (on bootup)
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That's actually what you are doing most of the time; initrd is just a small image of crap you need to find the rest of the system. In theory, you could just make a big one that has network drivers and the like.

It would still suck; Your bootup would be subject to internet problems at that point, which is never a fun fun thing.
 
XOR != OR said:
That's actually what you are doing most of the time; initrd is just a small image of crap you need to find the rest of the system. In theory, you could just make a big one that has network drivers and the like.

It would still suck; Your bootup would be subject to internet problems at that point, which is never a fun fun thing.
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yea i see it being alot more trouble than its worth
 
Hmm, XOR, you have a good point. I'm thinking all you really need is a bootp server on your network to push a small PXE or etherboot kernel. At this point you would already have an IP, DNS and and gateway through bootp/dhcp, and this stage kernel would just need to be able to mount the gmail fs. Then, it's a matter of retrieving the file and booting into the the kernel retrieved from gmail. I'm sure there are flaws in that logic though. Anyone interested in trying something like this?

Okay, so here's a ghetto way of doing it in the mean time:

1. Setup a DHCP server that sends tftp boot file info along with the DHCP offer, see this
howto

2. Setup a TFTP server, and install gmailfs. Mount your gmail filesystem and make it accessible by the TFTP server.

3. Store a remote bootable linux kernel on your gmail filesystem, such as one found on the Linux Terminal Server Project

4. Boot the target computer with PXE or Etherboot, it will receive IP configuration and tftp filename through bootp. It will contact the TFTP server for the kernel, which in turn retrives it from gmail.

5. Once the target computer boots the kernel, it should then mount the gmail fs itself as the root filesystem.

Ideas?
 
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