pingfs - by Erik Ekman <[email protected]>

An attempt at a toy filesystem using the network connection for storage.
The content of its files are not stored in RAM or local disks but in
ICMP Echo Request (Ping) packets that are sent to remote hosts. When and
if the data arrives back in a Echo Reply it will be available for reading
or writing to, and it will be sent out again. If no reply arrives, that
part of the data is lost.

The available bandwidth (and sanity) will limit the storage space inside the
file system. Selecting hosts that are close will give short latency and better
reliability but give less storage. Hosts on the other side of the globe will
take longer to respond which means a slower experience but space for more data.

pingfs uses raw sockets and FUSE, so it requires superuser rights to run.
It is written in Haskell.

This project is unfinished and abandoned. It can mount a directory, create
files and write to them. The data of the files is sent out to the ping hosts.
Reading or changing the file content is not supported.
IPv6 is not supported.

Note: It seems the ICMP checksum generation does not work anymore, probably
broke when updating to a newer ByteString or something. So remote hosts will
not answer the pings.

Start it with:
pingfs <mountdir> <hostfile>
mountdir is where the new filesystem will be mounted
hostfile is a file with targets, one hostname/IP per line

Stop it with ^C (pressing twice needed?)
Unmount the directory manually with fusermount -u <mountdir>

Please use the tool wisely to avoid abuse complaints.