Shriphani’s Weblog

Here is an excerpt from a mail in my gmail inbox:
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On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 09:31:39AM +0530, Shriphani Palakodety wrote:
> Hello,
> You are my IDOL !!. Every ext2fs utility that I see is made by you.
> There are countless times when debugfs and e2fsck played an important
> part in my “piddling” around with external devices. I applied to MIT
> for a place in the class of 2012 and I aim to be like you.

I’m glad those tools have been helpful for you.

Good luck getting into MIT!!

- Ted

That was a mail from Theodore T’so, the extremely cool maintainer of the e2fsprogs package and one of North America’s first Linux developers. He has like 2 degrees from MIT ( YAY!) and now works at IBM and gets paid to hack on Linux ( in short, gets paid to do what he likes ).

So let’s move on to something else. I happened to see this article on Semantic Filesystems and began thinking about it the entire day. I was trying to figure out the purpose they would serve. I then thought of the now-hacked TWINCLING WIKI (our mistake really). The web2.0 philosophy is more about reaching out using the Web and other nonsense, let us just say one opens up a “publicly editable” content management system - one where without logging into an account, an individual can put content up for the world to see (something like free advertising space - an idea? probably ). Let us say, I install something like drupal and implement FCKEeditor to allow people to throw content on this site. php’s file apis are more or less unix-like. If one gets the weird idea of throwing an “rm -rf” in there and getting it to execute somehow, BOOM!

It might seem easy to recover at first. But beware, once this CMS is removed, there is every chance that the backup is kicked out as well (if the backup is in the same directory as the CMS). Let us just say we had a file-system that knew about this installation and knew where the backups were. Within minutes after the attack, the intelligence the fs possesses should enable it to reinstall the CMS and put all the posts back. This is a better way of doing things than let’s say reinstalling the CMS manually hours after the it has been compromised. Sounds like a far cry, but is possible.

There can be worse situations at times. Let us just say that an administrator has found that a certain movie is taking up too much space on the filesystem(probably the movie is 5 gigs in size). He goes on to delete this file and realizes that no space has been freed. This is because the file will continue to take up space on the drive till the process which opened them is killed. Now that the file has no name, it is much harder to deal with. A filesystem with inherent intelligence should be able to perform the hardkill (signal 9) on every process accessing this file (this process could well be a search application keeping track of the files). Such enormous potential is what intelligent filesystems hold. 5 months till college. I can hardly wait.

By the way, that tweet over there —> will soon change