Comment by MayeulC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MayeulC | Hacker News Reader

Anyway, interesting idea. As another comment pointed out, I wish there was an easy way to mount NFS and 9p shares as a user.

I've been toying with 9p+Wireguard lately, as an alternative to SMB/Webdav/sftp/etc for sharing files with friends over the Internet. Wireguard+NFS works well enough, but it's relatively hard to integrate in userspace. Toying with rust-9p[1], I obtained acceptable performance. I still have to experiment with putting Wireguard in userspace as well (probably with Tailscale's implementation), but I come back to the difficulty of mounting 9p and NFS shares as a user. I also wish it was simpler to export directories over both protocols, on an unprivileged port, with access rights limited by those of the user.

Regarding the article content, I find 9p to be even simpler and probably more ubiquitous than NFS, though I don't know if MacOS and Windows natively support it.

[1]: https://github.com/pfpacket/rust-9p

If you haven't seen it, Cloudflare also has an implementation of Wireguard in userspace, called Boringtun [0], written in Rust and successfully deployed to millions of iOS and Android devices running the 1.1.1.1 app.

For reference, another Rust project that depends on Boringtun is Onetun [1], which uses it to encrypt packets sent over a virtual smoltcp interface. I imagine you could follow a similar approach to integrating rust-9p with Boringtun, and you wouldn't need to leave the Rust ecosystem (whereas you might face more obstacles integrating it with Tailscale's wgengine, which is written in Go).

[0] https://github.com/cloudflare/boringtun

[1] https://github.com/aramperes/onetun

> Anyway, interesting idea. As another comment pointed out, I wish there was an easy way to mount NFS and 9p shares as a user.

Add e.g. foo.bar.com:/path /net/foo.bar.com nfs to /etc/fstab with options=user ?

> Regarding the article content, I find 9p to be even simpler and probably more ubiquitous than NFS, though I don't know if MacOS and Windows natively support it.

Windows certainly does not. MacOS I don't know, but if you mean "natively" as "stock install without third-party software", then probably not.

> Windows certainly does not.

Actually, scratch that, comments below suggest that WSL2 uses 9P for file sharing with the host, so it's possible that a version of Windows with the WSL2 bits installed will support 9P.

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