[fedora-virt] libguestfs best practices: Exposing files from the host for the duration of a session

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 03:13:10AM -0700, Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote:
> On May 29, 2009, at 2:44, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> If we put an FTP server inside the appliance, things are better.  FTP
>> clients are widely available, either standalone or as libraries for
>> many programming languages.  They just need to be able to make a TCP
>> connection, so there is no requirement for special privileges.  On the
>> server side (inside the appliance) the FTP server is running as "root"
>> so it can make arbitrary changes to the filesystem.
>
> Please make FTP die already!  :-)
>
> How about HTTP (WebDAV) or - better - just use the ssh file transfer  
> protocol?

ssh isn't too widely supported (from programming language libraries).
Does libssh2 even support scp?

WebDAV is possible, but it comes down to how much crap it will depend
upon, all of which needs to go into the appliance.

FTP is widely supported and well understood, and the servers are old,
small, self-contained code.  I really think it's better for this, and
not just because I once wrote an FTP server ...

Rich.