Tuesday, August 09, 2005

A web site in an alternate data stream

A new blog by Inge Henriksen of Norway was pointed out to me today, and the posts so far are very interesting. One of the posts describes how to create an entire web site within NTFS Alternate Data Streams (ADSs).

An interesting thing about ADSs is that if you have a file with an ADS associated with it on a file share, and you drag-n-drop that file to another NTFS partition, the ADS will remain with the file. However, if you download files via HTTP or FTP, the ADSs are not persistent. But that's not what Inge is doing...the web server is simply serving up a file, and that's all that an ADS really is anyway...a file.

Remember, while Windows has native tools for creating ADSs, there are no tools native to the Windows distributions that allow you to view the existance of arbitrary ADSs.

If you're not familiar with ADSs, take a look at this article that I wrote on the subject...or read about ADSs in chapter 3 of my book.

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