Trouble Mounting Website Directory- Even Possible?
 

I have a program that displays weather data. This data, however, is very large and the program needs it to be local. What I am trying to do is mount an online directory that has all the data so that the program thinks its local, however the data will not be downloaded unless I'm trying to view it.

The directory is here:

http://136.145.85.36:8015/gempak/

Is mounting this directory even this even possible?

You should be able to do it using NFS or Samba. Here is a quick tutorial:

http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/77

If you still need help, please list the distro that you are using (for example, I use Mint).

Thanks!

I tried this yesterday. Maybe I was typing it wrong, but the connection would always time out. I am using xubuntu 13.04


Thanks!

I tried it last night too, and my connection timed out as well. I'll fool around with it and see if I can get it to work when I get home (I'm at work, and this is a Windows box that I am on).

Awesome! Thank you so much!

Unless you OWN the remote machine and have configured it to export those directories you will not be able to mount them locally.

From the whois they appear to belong to the University of Puerto Rico, I would guess that they do not export those via NFS or Samba (could be wrong).

So there is no way to "trick" my computer into thinking the directory is local? I can view the directory on a browser, but I don't have read access?

I can use wget to download the files, but the data is large and will just eat through my bandwidth if I am constantly downloading the files onto my home NAS.

It isn't really a matter of tricking your local computer, it is a matter of whether the remote machine allows it. If you know that they allow remote NFS or Samba mounts then point us to the page where they provide that info. As far as I can see they only make the data available via HTTP (i.e., web browser or other HTTP request.).

You could use something like wget to copy the remote directories to the local machine, but I don't think you could mount them and access them as if they were a local directory as per your original question.

You might look at a project over at http://httpfs.sourceforge.net/

This is a fuse implemented filesystem that uses http remote access to provide a file level view. It will NOT work for all cases, but something you can try.

Connection times out with httpfs2 also...
I'm starting to see that it isn't really possible.

Thanks for all the help though!

Wasn't sure it would work. For instance, it can't work when the server uses CGI to respond to requests - without the request parameters, you never get any data back (other than a "no data" type message).

It could work with a site that is designed to provide files though. Something like the kernel archives.