[NBLUG/talk] File System Choice for distributed sometimes disconnected systems?

Augie Schwer augie.schwer at gmail.com
Sat Jan 28 19:04:47 PST 2006


For me the home desktop is dead, and it's laptops from here on out,
but then that brings up the question of how to keep my /home synced
between different locations and different laptops? I mean how many
times have you said: "Oh, that's on my other machine."? This is no big
deal if your other machine is your always on, always connected
desktop, but what if it's that laptop at home and your at work?

Also depending on where I am, I may not have a dependable Internet
connection or one at all, so how can you keep /home up to date or use
it at all with no network connection?

Lastly the solution needs to be seamless and easy to use; I'm a
SysAdmin. I can run scripts, and spend most of my time at the command
prompt anyhow, but my wife is a non-SysAdmin. so she can hit a button,
but asking her to drop to the command line is going to get old real
fast for her.

So I am looking for suggestions and experiences; I would prefer a file
system implementation over scripts or utilities just because I think
it's cleaner, and a central file server colocated at Sonic.net is easy
to do.

The ideas I've toyed with so far are:

1) NFS mount when available followed by rsync or unison to keep things in order.
2) Keeping /home in Subversion control and doing updates and commits.

But the most promising so far seems to be coda, an AFS descendant that
is a distributed file system that offers disconnected operation, but I
need to investigate it further.

So is anyone doing something like this already? Are there any
suggestions? Is anyone using coda?

Augie.


--
Registered Linux user #229905
GPG Public Key: http://www.schwer.us/schwer.asc
Key fingerprint = 9815 AE19 AFD1 1FE7 5DEE 2AC3 CB99 2784 27B0 C072



More information about the talk mailing list