[plug] File sync; users over WAN with disparate fileservers

Bernd Felsche bernie at innovative.iinet.net.au
Sat Nov 13 15:50:06 WST 2004


I'm about to start doing something a little "unusual".

Users logged in over a WAN can create files on a server using an ERP
application.

I've deployed servers to most remote sites from where users connect,
and have prepared Samba shares for their abuse.

The interesting part is how to get any files that they generate on
the main server to their WAN-connected server so that they can
pretend to do something useful with it in say Excel.

Other than something like Intermezzo (intersync) that requires a
special filesystem, I can't find an easy way of moving stuff back
and forth transparently.

The crunch is that only some users are located at each of several
sites connected by WAN, so it becomes quite inefficient to use
intersync at the main server for the "mirroring". 

Unison allows for directory-tree synchronisation, but I don't see
how it can "watch" the tree as a daemon.

A combination of tripwire and rsync means more programming... and
rsync by itself needs to be re-run whenever there's a change to the
directory tree, just like unison.

Are there other possibilities?
-- 
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