The Road ahead becomes clearer
17, MarFor those following the fun and games going on here @ebrainpool, Both Jeetu and myself are currently in heavy coding mode, working on little pieces for the next release.
A quick update on things ... we wrangled back and forth about the timelines that would be required to develop and integrate the authentication and X Forwarding requirements. The good news is we are still sticking with libssh over trying to build a wrapper to handle the default ssh in most systems. Yes we did think about the fact that openssh might be updated more regularly on some systems, whilst keep an eye on security, but we felt the pain from the overall usability in this form was way too high. The current code relies on ugly calls to bash scripts to invoke all this and we really feel the need to do this better.
As of now Jeetu is handling the server side code and I am taking care of the client side code. Key based Authentication and X-forwarding are the key aspects both of us need to build into ebrainpool. Progress has been good, parts of this are working and we are still working towards a release somewhere towards the end of March, or more realistically early April, but we are keeping end March as our target.
In Brief: 1) Use libssh for inbuilt key authentication 2) Use libssh to handle X-Forwarding --the above two eliminate the need to rely on the openssh daemon running
2.5) Give some thought towards the cipher used and the option for user to change the default --Not critical right now. 3) Interface to handle storing keys and no manual copy of keys into the directory 4) use a storage engine ? SQlite --needs further discussion
with #1 and #2 above being completed, the code is much easier for people to setup and use, consider a release or wait for #3 above
What after this? proposed targets after this, #4 and head on towards 5) Fuse (libfuse).. or any other remote FS. Critical here is to handle data privacy and isolation
6) plugin based system to be protocol independent, maybe this should ideally be the next target instead. 7) Avahi, Bonjour for discovery etc... to be seen in conjunction with #6 As always, keep the messages coming and looking forward towards more conversation with all of you.