nbdkit now supports cURL — HTTP, FTP, and SSH connections

nbdkit is a liberally licensed NBD (Network Block Device) server designed to let you connect all sorts of crazy disk images sources (like Amazon, Glance, VMware VDDK) to the universal network protocol for sharing disk images: NBD.

New in nbdkit 1.1.8: cURL support. This lets you turn any HTTP, FTP, TFTP or SSH server that hosts a disk image into an NBD server.

For example:

$ nbdkit -r curl url=http://onuma/scratch/boot.iso

and then you can read the disk image using guestfish, qemu or any other nbd client:

$ guestfish --ro -a nbd://localhost -i

Welcome to guestfish, the guest filesystem shell for
editing virtual machine filesystems and disk images.

Type: 'help' for help on commands
      'man' to read the manual
      'quit' to quit the shell

/dev/sda mounted on /

><fs> _

If you are using a normal SSH server like OpenSSH which supports the SSH File Transfer Protocol (aka SFTP), then you can use SFTP to access images:

$ nbdkit -r curl url=sftp://rjones@localhost/~/fedora-20.img

I’m hoping to enable write support in a future version.

It doesn’t work at the moment because I haven’t worked out how to switch between read (GET) and write (POST) requests in a single cURL handle. Perhaps I need to use two handles? The documentation is confusing.