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

[Kyle Rankin]

On Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 07:04:47PM -0800, Augie Schwer wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 

One solution that's currently available is called iFolder and is being
actively developed by Novell. It's a p2p type filesystem that is supposed
to be set up so that once you share an "iFolder" on multiple hosts, you can
make a change on one, and it gets automatically synched to the others for
you. It's supposed to be cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac) as well:

http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder/

I'm not sure whether it's at a "1.0" level of stability yet but it's worth
trying out.

Another thing you might want to look into is integrating something like
laptop-net (IIRC you use Mandrake so I don't think that laptop-net is
packaged for you, but I'm sure there's a workalike you can use). Basically
it's would let you script actions based on which network you are connected
so, so you could have it do syncs for you whenever you connect to any
network or just networks you know about.

I suppose one final choice could be keeping your settings all on some sort
of pocket flash memory that you simply plug into whatever computer you
happen to be on. Then your settings could follow you around. In the case of
a Windows computer you could also accompany it with Knoppix or some other
live CD so Linux would follow you as well.

Hope some of those ideas helped. It should be interesting to see what
everyone comes up with in this thread... whatever you decide Augie, it
sounds like a GREAT presentation once you figure it out :)

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org