Geeky Trick of the Day: HTTPFS

Recently there have been a few projects using HTTPFS (A Fuse based
filesystem) as a method to mount file URL's to the filesystem. Some
of the projects show off their method of installing or using a Linux
distribution via a LiveCD hosted on a web server somewhere.

I have my own mad scientist moments all of the time, I have worked
with stackable filesystems to make distributions that work well on r/o
media much like a LiveCD, so this sort of intrigued me.

Tonight after downloading the horrid source tarbal for the HTTPFS
project hosted at http://httpfs.sf.net/ and installing the program I
managed to geek out with the following series of commands.

$ mkdir ubuntu-6.10-desktop
$ ./httpfs http://mirrors.cat.pdx.edu/ubuntu-iso/edgy/ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso
ubuntu-6.10-desktop/
$ ls ubuntu-6.10-desktop/
ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso (!!! interesting)
$ qemu -cdrom ubuntu-6.10-desktop/ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso -boot d
-net nic -net user

... ubuntu boots ...

Ok, it was cool enough to share. There are quite a few applications I
can see this working, I also wonder if this is how the USB CDROM
emulation mode works on some IP-KVM's.

One of the sites attempting to use HTTPFS for evil geeky wonders is
http://www.vamosproject.org/

Shane
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Received on Tue Mar 13 21:48:41 2007