Why neocitiesfs?

raison d'être

I've acquired an anycast IP address and I wanted a way to sync my websites across each box without having to think about it; upload to a single box then be synchronized across all boxes. Sure I could use a bash script that rsync's across all boxes, Rclone, a git hook, etc, but I wanted something simpler;

• Mountable
• Secondary Server copy contents (to disk) of Primary Server(s)
  • Mostly Read-Only files
  • A handful of dynamic files (will need to logic out how that'll work, later)
• A way to rotate 'Primary Servers' should one go down

But to know if I could achieve these goals in a reasonable time, I decided to try something simple first, neocitiesfs.pl.

After writing neocitiesfs.pl, I am reasonably confident that I can handle these basic goals. Honestly, writing a virtual filesystem with Fuse is shockingly easy. Fuse API (or the Fuse module I was using) hid away most of the complexities making it easy to program this thing.

Some caveats with neocitiesfs.pl:

• All directories are 755 and all files are 644 and not chmod(1)-able
• If mounted and changes occur on neocities site, the program won't notice until it fetches a listing
• Doesn't know about DAC permissions, but OS may enforce them
• Updating 'times' (atime, mtime, ctime) is not implemented
• username and password or api on the command line so it'll be stored in .bash_history and viewable with process managers
  • --config can 'hide' it but you'll need to put some smart DAC perms on it
• Not perfect software, some bugs maybe lurking, could definitely use refactoring/shrinking
• File explorers, like Thunar, may read each file which can take a while
• Single threaded; not sure if multi-threading would work well... Notably %files won't be shared between threads(?)/processes(?) (don't know that much about multithreading sadly)
  • Multithreaded! Yay! Too bad some programs don't know how to handle this effectively; e.g. open an image -> program decides to get_dir() and read each file, one by one, for some reason (maybe to make sure it can view the image then add it to a 'playlist' if the user presses the arrow key? But then if you press the arrow key, it tries to read the image anyway (annoying)!)
  • Caching has been added! However, initial reads from VFS is abysmally s l o w
• Loose internet in the middle of editing? Lol! Goodbye edits! (unless you actually save to disk somewhere first)

I don't really see that many people using it but I thought it's a neat project.

Note: this won't work on windows, but maybe if you install WSL or something it could, idk. I won't test it :)

"This is simpler?" ... maybe not but it is very cool!