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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!pipex!uknet!cf-cm!paul From: paul@isl.cf.ac.uk (Paul) Subject: hacking a libc to work across a net Message-ID: <1993May26.134240.4706@cm.cf.ac.uk> Sender: news@cm.cf.ac.uk (Network News System) Organization: University of Wales College of Cardiff, Cardiff, WALES, UK. Date: Wed, 26 May 1993 13:42:38 +0000 Lines: 42 This is a slight abuse of this newsgroup but it seemed a good place to get some help. On my LAN I have two diskless vision systems running a real-time version of unix called PICNIX. These people using them have pc's running pctcp's tn to log into them. PICNIX is very basic, basically just enough to multitask but it does have tcp/ip. Now a number of users want to save the images they get from the vision systems onto disk so they can manipulate the data offline. I set up a hack for someone a while back that just opened a port to one of the Sun's on the LAN, sent the data down the port, collected it on the sun and saved it to a file, which they could then ftp back to their pc's. It was a one off hack and it involved a lot of intervention from me to get it to work. Now that there are many users wanting this facility I need something more transparent. I have the sources for the PICNIX libc. I was wondering if I could actually re-write parts of libc to carry out all the necessary work so that users on picnix can just use fopen, fprintf etc as though they did have a hard disk. For instance, I thought I'd rewrite fopen to initialise the link and fprintf to send the data across. Does this sound like a reasonable idea. If so, how about some pointers as to what I need to do and what problems I may have. Another idea I had was to try and get an nfs client running in user space as part of the users program. Any comments on this? The host with the hard disk is going top be my 386BSD machine so if necessary I can hack at that end too. Does all this sound a little hairy or would it be feasable? -- Paul Richards, University of Wales, College Cardiff Internet: paul@isl.cf.ac.uk spedpr@thor.cf.ac.uk