[plug] making linux desktops consistent

[Craig Ringer]

On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 11:20, Ben Jensz wrote:

> 1)  Network dropouts - how would NFS, or any other networked filesystem 
> handle this?

NFS doesn't. Things just block indefinitely. You can use soft NFS
mounts, but if I remember correctly that'll just cause it to give up and
return an I/O error - which would be even more annoying.

There are network file-systems designed to handle disconnected operation
(coda, afs?), but they don't seem widely used or tested.

> 2)  Data being written / read constantly from the server.. creates 
> constant network load and constant server load (in particular disk load) 
> on the server handling it.

It's not too bad in my experience, so long as the server has a
reasonable amount of RAM. It'll keep all regularly used files in memory
anyway, so only writes will actually incur real disk load. Network load
can be significant, but doesn't seem to be _too_ bad.

> The other approach I can see being used is somewhat along the lines of 
> what Windows does, and that is.. load the profile up onto the client's 
> desktop and manipulate the profile data there.. and sync it back with 
> the copy on the server once the user logs off.

This gives you the Windows problem of "your profile was modified while
disconnected. Would you like to overwrite the remote profile with the
local profile? <yes> <no>" (or something very like that)

Users inevitably choose the wrong thing, overwriting their work, or call
you to ask.

> would 
> probably be a lot more efficient at syncing the changed files back and 
> forth than Windows does with its system (it seems to just sync things 
> that haven't even been modified a lot of the time).

Seems to copy everything, in fact, at least under Win98. This is a pain
when the staff think folders on the desktop are an ideal way to store 4
years of word processing documents. I try to replace them with links to
network volumes, but they're always recreating and re-sorting so it
never lasts. *sigh*.

> So then the question I suppose would be.... how would one setup an 
> efficient system along the lines of this as opposed to doing it via a 
> persistent connection to a server?

With difficulty, I suspect, unless you just decide that the client
_always_ overwrites the server (or vice versa) when syncing. Both
approaches have problems. Prompting the user is both somewhat tricky,
and likely to confuse them. 

Craig Ringer