DLSLUG Notes, 5-June-2008: Bill Stearns on FUSE Filesystems

[Ted Roche]

Twenty-two people attended the June meeting of the Dartmouth-Lake 
Sunapee Linux User Group (http://www.dlslug.org) held as usual on the 
first Thursday of the month. We were fortunate once again to get room 
041 in the lower-level of Haldeman, with power and ethernet jacks at 
each seat.

As seems required at each LUG meeting, persuading the projector to show 
X is always a challenge. Bill Stearns is a big believer in the "power on 
the projector first, then the laptop connected to the projector" theory, 
which I also like. Today, though, 800 x 600 was the best he could do, 
even with this work-around. There's a good Summer of Code project in 
there somewhere, if not a PhD thesis. Video negotiations between machine 
and display start with bootup and BIOS code and run through X 
configuration and ends with xrandr or direct x.org tweaking.

Bill McGonigle also recorded the audio from the event. Keep an eye out 
for an announcement on when the recording might be available. (With gas 
prices climbing, I'll be attending more meetings virtually via podcast. 
Someone ought to do a meeting on... :)

Bill Stearn's presentation was on FUSE (http://fuse.sourceforge.net/) 
filesystems, additional file systems over and above what's needed to 
start your system. There are infinite possibilities on what you might 
want loaded as a block device and manipulated with the tools that know 
how to work with a filesystem: a compressed archive, a remote music 
source, a database, an encrypted volume, etc., and there's a good chance 
someone's already started writing a FUSE driver for it. The list 
(http://fuse.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/FileSystems) or drivers 
under development is pretty impressive and some of them fairly innovative.

Bill provided slides to establish the basic terminology and to walk 
through the basic commands of setting up a couple of the FUSE 
filesystems. Soon abandoning the slideshow, Bill hopped into a shell and 
actually performed the operations, showing how an encrypted filesystem 
might work, how archives could be read as files (or grepped or wc'd 
or...) and how gluster (http://www.gluster.org/) , a cluster file system 
capable of managing petabytes, could be used. There was a lot of 
audience participation and "Yeah, but what if..." questions and a good 
time was had by all.

Roger Trussel is scheduled to present at the July meeting. Details 
coming soon; stay tuned!

Thanks to Bill Stearns for his great presentation and handouts, Bill 
McGonigle for organizing, promoting and herding cats at the meeting, to 
Heidi Strohl (http://www.heidistrohl.com) for providing the refreshments 
(awesome cookies!) and to all for attending and participating.

-- 

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com