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Plan 9's 9P is a nice file protocol: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/5/INDEX.html.

A client implementation has been available for Linux since version 2.6 (http://cm.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/v9fs/index.html).

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Unfortunately 9P2000 tends to perform badly over high latency connections. There was talk of writing a new version that would allow clients to group certain messages, but nothing ever came of it.

Edit: I just found a very recent paper on Improving the performance of Styx based services over high latency links (Styx being the Inferno name for 9P): http://gsyc.es/tr-docs/RoSaC-2011-2.pdf

Ah, yes, that would be the work on Op, which IIRC can act as a sort of proxy, meaning you shouldn't have to re-write any clients or servers. There is also an experimental implementation of 9P "streams", which actually resemble a passive FTP transfer--a separate TCP connection is negotiated via the 9P connection and then used solely to transfer file data.

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