The other day I had an idea that wouldn't go away, a filesystem that exported the contents of ~/.ssh/known_hosts.

I can't think of a single useful use for it, beyond simple shell-scripting, and yet I couldn't resist.

 $ go get -u github.com/skx/knownfs
 $ go install github.com/skx/knownfs

Now make it work:

 $ mkdir ~/knownfs
 $ knownfs ~/knownfs

Beneat out mount-point we can expect one directory for each known-host. So we'll see entries:

 ~/knownfs $ ls | grep \.vpn
 builder.vpn
 deagol.vpn
 master.vpn
 www.vpn

 ~/knownfs $ ls | grep steve
 blog.steve.fi
 builder.steve.org.uk
 git.steve.org.uk
 mail.steve.org.uk
 master.steve.org.uk
 scatha.steve.fi
 www.steve.fi
 www.steve.org.uk

The host-specified entries will each contain a single file fingerprint, with the fingerprint of the remote host:

 ~/knownfs $ cd www.steve.fi
 ~/knownfs/www.steve.fi $ ls
 fingerprint
 frodo ~/knownfs/www.steve.fi $ cat fingerprint
 98:85:30:f9:f4:39:09:f7:06:e6:73:24:88:4a:2c:01

I've used it in a few shell-loops to run commands against hosts matching a pattern, but beyond that I'm struggling to think of a use for it.

If you like the idea I guess have a play:

• https://github.com/skx/knownfs

It was perhaps more useful and productive than my other recent work - which involves porting an existing network-testing program from Ruby to golang, and in the process making it much more uniform and self-consistent.

The resulting network tester is pretty good, and can now notify via MQ to provide better decoupling too. The downside is of course that nobody changes network-testing solutions on a whim, and so these things are basically always in-house only.

Tags: fuse, golang | 3 comments