Design and implementation of a portable and extensible FTP to NFS gateway

Abstract

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an FTP to NFS gateway. The gateway exports an "FTP file system" to NFS clients. Once this file system is mounted on a client machine, files and directories accessible through the FTP protocol on any FTP server on the Internet appear as local files on the machine's file system. All existing programs can then transparently access these files for both reading and writing. Both anonymous and authenticated FTP access are supported.The gateway is implemented in Java and is thus platform independent. The design of the gateway allows Support for other file access protocols such as HTTP to be easily added. Performance experiments indicate an acceptable extra overhead while accessing files through the gateway.