@ilzu That’s pretty cool considering how old that code is.
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The main issue is that I don’t have a working BeServerd to test against. There was a version for Windows IIRC. I don’t have anything that runs BeOS apart from PowerPC machines now. I guess if others get it to build under Haiku, I can test that way?!
Most of the issues were to go with byte swapping IIRC, and that the original author wrote it specifically for Intel OS, and so the PowerPC requiring bigendian caused a lot of weird edge cases. I think I got it as far as the daemon running and the UI showing that other clients existed. I really forget how it all worked though.
There was server for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris if I recall. The Windows version is in the sources, but alas *nix versions are missing. When this got open sourced did they release the source for those too? @axeld seems to have committed the source in the first place, do you recall if there was sources to the linux etc server?
A quick update, for now I have managed to compile most of the binaries, the server and filesystem need more work to get to compile and the network browser too.
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Wow, thanks to everyone. this is so cool.
I have two Haiku boxes and a Windows box I can test with. If I need to I can also do a Linux box.
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Probably it’s a stupid thought, but setting up a muscle server won’t do the same thing?
No. You could make a new daemon to publish the data and a GUI client to allow the file sharing to be graphical, but this basically does a lot more.
Also MUSCLE is an API for Pub/Sub style API’s and has absolutely nothing tying it to file system stuff, it’s just that BeShare is the most visible use of MUSCLE.
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Another quick update, I’ve managed to get everything but the filesystem driver to compile. That needs some real work, but I’ll try to get that working too.
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That’s great. I hope the rest doesn’t give you too much of a problem. Thanks for taking time to work on this. 
I think the filesystem part will give me a lot of problems, but I’ll take that as a learning experience. And I have use for that software myself, as I have few Haiku boxes, few Haiku VMs and few old BeOS VMs and I need to throw files around those (and perhaps the linux boxes and VMs too) and ftp is cumbersome. I actually bought that software back in the day.
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You may be able to get things working “for now” by using the BeOS filesystem API compatibility layer that is included with userlandfs, before you migrate things to the Haiku filesystem API.
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Thanks for the tip, I might try that.
If you need some help testing. I have two Haiku Boxes I can test between. I also have a Windows Box if that becomes relevant.
Thanks
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@ilzu also, if you get it working for 32bit (the only version I can easily test with) I can try to get the PowerPC stuff working.
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Another quick update, the fs driver builds with the BeOS filesystem API compatibility layer @waddlesplash mentioned, but for now doesn’t yet work. I’ll look at it more when I have time for that. I also have been porting the driver to native Haiku FS api. Luckily the fs driver was based partially on NFS driver for BeOS which was ported to haiku later, so I will be able to look what needs to be changed.
The server app works and I have been able to serve files to BeOS VM from 64 bit Haiku.
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This is so cool.
Do we really need to resurrect this? Why not use the already available NetFS part of Haiku? Or is this better and should it replace NetFS?
Probably not. I have been playing with that code just for just out of curiosity and for learning experience and to see if my skills are up to getting it to work on Haiku, for fun, and for easy way to share files with my computers running different OS’s (including a VM running BeOS R5 for nostalgia’s sake). I don’t know if that is better or worse than NetFS on any level, but on one thing in BeServed wins: the platform support. The server is available for windows and BeOS (and was for linux but I think the source was lost). So getting this to work on Haiku is less work than writing NetFS server / client for other platforms.
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I think so - because I doubt the way Netfs works, it would easily port to BeOS, and making this work would be really handy for my specific use case - I need a filesystem that respects attributes and allows interoperability between BeOS (PowerPC) and Haiku. I mean - if @ilzu wasn’t working on this, I would be looking at something based on MUSCLE.
Our NetFS was initially developped on BeOS so that should work. The announcement back in 2007 has a screenshot of it running under BeOS R5: Haiku Getting UserlandFS, NetFS | Haiku Project
Not sure about PowerPC, however, and I think NetFS has known compatibility problems between 32 and 64bit systems. So if BeServed works better, I’m fine with replacing NetFS.
Okay - that is another avenue. PowerPC is obviously 32bit, and my only Haiku hardware is still only a 32bit Netbook. I am hoping to upgrade my MacBook Pro at some point as I have a spare SSD now, but I just haven’t had any time recently. I might also try and get my Surface 2 Pro to work again, as it is completely useless under Windows these days because it only has 4GiB RAM.