[plug] Syncing live Data

[William Kenworthy]

On Sat, 2010-12-04 at 11:36 +1100, Daniel Pittman wrote:
> Patrick Coleman <blinken at gmail.com> writes:
> > On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 9:26 PM, Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> Given that I am not aware of any cluster file systems that will work across
> >> both Windows and Linux systems (and given this is a Linux list) I suggested
> >> some solutions that would work between a pair of Linux servers.
> >
> > I would look seriously at Windows DFS. But, this is a Linux list.
> > Google is your friend.
> 
> I don't believe it would fix the OPs problem anyhow: unless Samba 4 will
> participate in a DFS replication agreement, that will give a unified namespace
> but not replication, which the OP stated was a requirement.
> 
> You *really* don't want to do CIFS over a WAN link - the protocol is hugely
> latency sensitive, and some of the common client tools *cough* office *cough*
> make literally thousands of random, single-byte synchronous requests while
> they open a document.  Non-replicated DFS would make some files super-painful
> for the clients to open.
> 
>         Daniel

This is turning into a general discussion on file systems!

xtreemfs has been mentioned - I am in the process of setting this up for
testing and would be interested in knowing if anyone is using it
successfully and if there are any gotchas?  

I am replicating an approximately 14GB home directory (actually a
subdirectory of /home/user) using unison across 4 machines/sites with
dirvish backup to read only copies for versioning.  Xtreemfs looks like
a viable alternative to the unison part of keeping everything consistent
but I am unsure how it work with a laptop that is often isolated from
the network, and will reconnect from various sites/places.

BillK