cockmonger

Lately i've been seeing programs online allowing gMail account (1gb) to be used as extra harddrive space. If this can be accomplished i was wondering how hard it would be to turn a gmail webaccount into server space to build and store and store as a webpage. does this sound practical or doable? thanks.

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fearless_leader

"Shit" said the king and a 1,000 loyal arse-holes glistened in the sun.

arch13

I want to see the proof of concept of this!
I'm sure it violates Gmail's TOS, but just the proof that it could be done would be slashdot and possible AP fodder!
In otherwords Cockmonger, do it and there will be a white paper on you

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Irishsean

Anyone else heard of this, be very interesting if its true... Hell, I don't even care about the webserver part. If someone could make a program that made my account appear to be a hard drive I could back stuff up to it to take to a friends house and that would be a lot easier than burning CDs everytime I want to take over a 10 meg file.

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Church

Or you could buy a jump drive?

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glytch

I'm not sure about using it as a webserver, (actually, I'm almost positive this isn't possible), but there have been ways to use Gmail as mountable storage under Linux, if that helps any.

Actually, there is a Windows program that does this as well. Check out <a href="http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm">GMail Drive.

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shadowalker

I personially use 2 of my gmail accounts as a gmail drive, its nice to be able to access files on the road, when i know i'm going out and i may need access to some i upload them to my gmail drive, and then i can pick the off another system when i get there, I do keep Gmail Drive on my usb drive so i can have access later on other systems if thay have something i want.

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bendsley

GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail.

GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename. This means that you can use all your favourite unix command line tools to operate on files stored on Gmail (e.g. cp, ls, mv, rm, ln, grep etc. etc.).

Here is an image for the proof-of-concept.

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Installing GmailFS:
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1) Make sure you have Python 2.3 installed. Most Linux distributions will have their own package for this (you'll also need the appropriate python2.3-dev packages).

2) Install version 1.3 of FUSE. Some Linux distributions (such as Debian) come with a package. If your distro doesn't, you can find the source at FUSE's SourceForge download page.

3) Download the Python FUSE bindings. These are also available from FUSE's CVS page - but if you grab CVS, remember that the Python bindings don't work with the rest of CVS at the moment (as at 2004-08-26); you still need to use FUSE 1.3. Untar fuse-python.tar.gz and follow the instructions in fuse-python/INSTALL.

4) Download libgmail. After untarring, copy libgmail.py and constants.py to somewhere Python can find them (/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ works for Debian, others may vary).

5) Download gmailfs.tar.gz. After untarring, copy gmailfs.py to somewhere easily accessible (for example, /usr/local/bin/gmailfs.py).

-- Copy mount.gmailfs to /sbin/mount.gmailfs. This is a modified version of mount.fuse distributed with FUSE 1.3.

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Using GmailFS
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You can mount your Gmail filesystem either via fstab or on the command line using mount.

To use fstab, create an entry /etc/fstab that looks something like:

/usr/local/bin/gmailfs.py /path/of/mount/point gmailfs noauto,username=gmailuser, password=gmailpass, fsname=zOlRRa
Note: If you cut and paste this entry remember to remove the spaces after the commas

The username and password fields speak for themselves. The fsname is the name of this Gmail filesystem. It is important to choose a hard-to-guess name here - because if others can guess the fsname, they can corrupt your Gmail filesystem by injecting spurious messages into your Inbox.

To mount from the command line, do:
mount -t gmailfs /usr/local/bin/gmailfs.py /path/of/mount/point -o username=gmailuser, password=gmailpass, fsname=zOlRRa
Note: If you cut and paste this entry remember to remove the spaces after the commas

Warning: both of these methods have serious security issues. If you run a multi-user system, others can easily see your Gmail username and password. If this is a problem for you then you will need to modify gmailfs.py , changing DefaultUsername,DefaultPassword and DefaultFsname as appropriate. A future version of GmailFS will load these values from config files in the user's home directory.

GmailFS also has a blocksize option. The default blocksize is 5MB. Files smaller than the minimum blocksize will only use the amount of space required to store the file, NOT the full blocksize. Note that any files created during a previous mount with a different blocksize will retain their original blocksize until deleted. For most applications you will make best use of your bandwidth by keeping the blocksize as large as possible.

When you delete files, GmailFS will place the files in the trash. libgmail does not currently support purging items from the trash, so you will have to do this manually when logged into your Gmail account.

To avoid seeing the messages created for your Gmail filesystem you probably want to create a filter which automatically archives GmailFS messages as they come into your Inbox. The best approach is probably to search for the fsname value; it'll be in the subject of all GmailFS messages.

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heinousk

There's a Windows version of GmailFS now. It's here: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

bendsley

Yeah, but.......why the hell would you want to use windows? =)

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"You hear the one about the fella who died, went to the pearly gates? St. Peter let him in. Sees a guy in a suit making a closing argument. Says, "Who's that?" St. Peter says, "Oh, that's God. Thinks he's Denny Crane."

toilet_duck

While we're on the topic of Gmail enhancements, I thought I should mention Gmail Wireless and gPopper just for fun.

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ibis

Couldn't you set up Apache or some other kind of simular program to share from the gmailfs volume?

cockmonger

so illegal stealing of bandwidth is the final answer huh? worth a shot.

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Lovely party Geoffery, but theres a turd in the punch bowl.
-George Carlin

jonjon42

this actually isn't that hard since all the gmail "website" is is a big javascript that sends and recieves messages with the server. Take apart the script and you can do something like this without too much trouble, but it does take time.

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