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

[Craig Ringer]

On Sat, 2004-11-13 at 23:58, Bernd Felsche wrote:

> Webdav? Some of the reports contain sensitive data (privacy act)
> that must be protected from the view of others on the VPN. If I
> understand the concept of Webdav correctly, it's for multiple users
> sharing the same files (for collaborative authoring, etc), not for
> one user having transparent mirroring of file changes between
> systems. Webdav must sustain user permissions; and the wwwrun user
> permissions of the apache server don't have access to the user's
> files. It doesn't seem like a good fit.

Indeed. The Apache mod_dav server probably won't do what you want out of
the box. The sort of thing you want is better handled by something like
Zope/Plone, but that's an awful lot of very complex software if all you
need is a WebDAV server.

I've also been less than impressed with WebDAV integration in any OS so
far. Konqueror under Linux works rather well, but isn't smart enough to
hand WebDAV URIs out to applications that can understand them - like
other KDE apps that use KIO, or OpenOffice. Juggling temp files is not a
great way to work IMO.

Windows has theoretical WebDAV support, but most comments I've heard are
that it's rather closer to "IIS DAV" support :-( and a bit flakey
anyway.

It sounds to me like what you want is a distributed filesystem ... but I
don't know if any of the current offerings are overly attractive. You
may find it's worth looking into Windows file servers for this, as if I
recall correctly recent versions have some pretty funky distributed
filesystem support.

> >By the way, you seem to have posted from a newsgroup server which
> >has a stuffed up reply to - evolution is trying to make sense of
> >the address

Evo (1.4) didn't give me any trouble ... I hadn't even noticed it was a
news post.

--
Craig Ringer