Slashdot Mirror
Organizing Data Across a Heterogeneous Net?
angst_ridden_hipster asks: "Like many people, I have a bunch of machines I use regularly. These include Linux machines, BSD machines, a Mac OS X machine, and a Windows machine. These machines are on a number of networks. All have internet connectivity. Some of them are always powered on. A few of them are not. Obviously, I have a bunch of accounts. And, it goes without saying, I have a bunch of data. What are the best approaches to sharing data? I want to be able to securely access my home data while at work, and from one machine to another, etc. Opening ssh terminals is the approach I have traditionally used, but I'm beginning to wonder if some mirroring software (e.g., Unison) might be in order. It'd provide the function of backups, as well as guaranteeing availability. Would it be wiser to tunnel nfs over ssh? Or is there some better option?
Assuming I actually start mirroring data across multiple machines, I'll need to organize it in a portable taxonomy. This is almost easy, since I use cygwin on the Windows machines, so I can assume a standard Unix-ish directory structure. But this gets more complicated when there are scripts or other code involved. What about application/platform-specific data? How do other people organize their data, anyway? Are there any useful standards? I'm hoping people will describe their approaches, and why they think they're (not) the best."
Without knowing more about the type of data you're storing, I would recommend putting it in a database. I like PostgreSQL 7.x myself.
For the software, I would organize it in a directory structure and use rsync+ssh to mirror it as needed.
For backup software, use Amanda.
For file sharing, use Samba.
'Nuff said.
I've been thinking of tackling this problem for awhile too. The best I can do is that you abstract the 'directory' (the list of what you have), for replication, accessibility (with convenience as the priority, especially). Then, when you need to do something with that data, your directory knows where it is and how to get at it. In this case, the convenience of accessibility isn't as crucial, and thus the need to transparently glue all these platforms and protocols, etc together isn't quite as important.
For me, I'd just like a top down, real time view with convenient access of what I have - getting it anywhere and anytime isn't quite as crucial for me.
Maybe you make a little daemon that can monitor your data respositories at several sources and 'merge' the data listings at a central source for publishing to multiple sources again?
"Old man yells at systemd"
Not enough info to answer the question. How much data total? How much needs to go out of the house? Do you want common accounts to various machines? What machines do you use most? What kind of data are you storing/want access to? What is your backup medium, what os is it linked to?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I put my porn collection on a couple of Jaz drives and just carry them around. I call them my "jiz disks".
I found this on google: Amoeba WWW Home Page
This seems to me to be a unique way of sharing data, since it isn't machine centric. Rather, it focuses on the user and the user's data. I have no experience with Amoeba, but on the face, it seems to answer this person's question.
My question is this: Why has interest for Amoeba dried up? (Or has it?) What with the proliferation of alternative OS'es over the past few years, why hasn't Amoeba caught on?
IBM has released Transarc's AFS as OpenAFS (http://www.openafs.org). Don't know if that is what you're looking for, but it is pretty nice. It's also portable, so it runs on various unices as well as Windows. Most can be found as binaries if you don't want to roll your own.
AFS is an NFS style implementation though, so you would have to save your files onto a special mount.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
"kio_fish is a kioslave for KDE 2/3 that lets you view and manipulate your remote files using just a simple shell account and some standard unix commands on the remote machine. You get full filesystem access without setting up a server - no NFS, Samba,
It works through SSH, so everthing is encrypted.
I use this with the konqueror file browser, but all KDE apps can transparently access files on remote hosts using this amazing utility, which required no special setup on either end, at least on my systems.
Solved all my data sharing needs - and andromeda solved the rest :)
sig sig sputnik
What you need is something known as a "server." A server is where you can store all your files, and in some cases, account information.
With the right kind of server, it can do AppleShare, NFS, and SMB, allowing all your other machines to mount the shares and make them appear as local drives. This keeps all your data in one place, allowing for easy backups, and also makes it easy to get at the same files from any computer.
My personal preference is a Linux computer with several cheap IDE drives each on their own IDE controller (no slave drives). The drives are configured as software RAID 5 and ext3. Regular backups are setup through cron to a tape drive. Samba handles file sharing, printing, roaming profile, and PDC duties for Windoze. Netatalk 1.6cvs handles file sharing duties for pre-OSX systems. NFS is used for file sharing to *nix systems. The only thing I'm missing is a NetInfo daemon for Linux so it can act as a complete configuration server for NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, and MacOS X systems.
I'd say what you need is an internet-enabled file system. Some might say NFS, and that seems like a fine solution.
On the other hand, if you have a computer that is always on, that can run Apache, you can have your own personal WebDAV server instead. Simply install mod_dav, and access it through mod_ssl, and have a secure web-based filesystem.
Better than NFS, you can mount it on Windows (through web folders), Linux (through davfs) and Mac OSX (through the native DAV file system client that is designed to run with iDisk).
NOTE: I work for Xythos software, and we make an enterprise-level WebDAV server called the Xythos WebFile Server. It's significantly more expensive than free, and we run in-house copies of the product (y'know eat your own dogfood), so that's where I keep my shared data, but if I didn't, I'd have mod_dav running right now.
And this posted to a Slashdot forum ... yikes.
I have twelve computers in my apartment and use all of them for something-or-other. Several are just test machines but even with those, I used to run into situations all the time where I saved something on one machine and forgot to do anything with it.
:)
My solution was to write a series of little scripts to copy data from common share points on each machine to a large, central data store, and into a "backed-up" directory on the workstations. Presently my central data store is 600GB of IDE disks in a RAID1 array (10 disks, total). If I lose the central fileserver, all my data, and the scripts needed to recreate the information in that 600GB is sitting out on my workstations
It's kind of a brute force approach, but it works OK. I'm not sure how well it would work for non-local systems, though.
I'm sure there are better ways to do what I do, too, but it's nice to have a single place to look for my MP3s or whatever, while knowing they're backed-up in multiple locations as well.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
first of all, seperate your home life and work life. Then seperate the data. I understand that once in a while you need data from one place at the other, but avoid those situations.
At work: that is IS's problem. Store all work data on the work machines, and make IS do the backups. Use SSH, or other VPN when you want to work from home. Compile (or whatever) at work as much as possible. If you have data that you need on the road, get a laptop or PDA for work, and synchronize that when you are at work.
At home: set up a linux box (a 386 is enough, though you might want more) with a big disk, a UPS, and a network card. Put it in a closet or on a shelf. Install SAMBA, and Netatalk. with NFS built in (though there is better than NFS if you look, nfs is there) Use one loging for all machines.
Laptops are a problem, because you often want to use them where you can't get to the network. The first solution to that problem is 820.11. Use it at home, and look for open access on the road. With good VPN (ssh+nfs) you can get to your network server from many places. I manually synchronize only the files I need, but my laptop is rarely used outside of 802.11 areas, if you travel often, then you might need more. (CODA? AFS? )
I'm not sure if this is entirely applicable to your situation, but here's what I do, and it works reasonably well.
:P
...
I have a server on a public IP address that runs SAMBA, but only accepts connections from 'localhost'. From my Windows box and iBook (running OS X), I just do a bit of SSH tunneling, and I'm able to mount the machine from anywhere I happen to be.
As far as I can tell, it's reasonably secure, and it works just fine for general files.
I also have a CVS repository on the server for my development projects, but that doesn't work so well for binary files like images and Word documents.
One of my friends keeps his files synchronized via an htaccess protected website which allows him to download and upload files. If you're interested, I'll see what I can do to track down his PHP script
Now this is not totally fair, since it implies a pointy haired boss situation. All it really means is that that you would would have to have a better definition of the problem.
What it seems that you really need is an application, a database, that would constantly monitor in realtime the status and availablility of your various resources. This would tie into your other dataservices so that when you do a query on "XP sourcecode", or whatever, one of the result you get is from this resource monitor database saying that "the resource is offline" or "the data is available, but you don't have access rights", etc. depending of the resource status, and other realtime situations.
It occurs to me that clever design of the database may be able to do the resource availibily query in advance of the actual access of the data, so that you do not get a crash or whatever if a child record or whatever is unavailable.
Currently, I do not know of any tool that does this, although obviously this is not my area of expertise.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I might be off base here, but..
Why not use Gnutella or a similar P2P system? There are clients for basically any OS out there, the files don't have to reside in a central location.
It works for the internet - Why not your own 'mini-internet'?
One modification you would want make is to get it to make a listing of all that you have.
Could you use SSH tunneling with a system like that?
Put a small raid 5 partition on your *nix machine. Store everything there, and use your access of choice to use the data on your other machines. I like ssh/scp for access, as it works mostly everywhere, and is encrypted, but then again most of my data needs accessed in a CVS manner. If you are constantly editing word docs and the such, samba would perhaps be a better option.
This way the data is in one spot, but it's much less vulnerable to hdd failure. Plus since it's on a *nix machine, you can export it to your clientelle.
Unless you want to share your data with lots of 'friends' you just haven't met yet.
NFS is used very often to mount home directories. But what is stopping someone from unplugging the workstation, plugging in a linux laptop with the IP of the legitimate workstation and mount the share, "su - user", and voila, you now have all the user's files.
That's just the simplest way. The problem is that most NFS implementations don't have *any* authentication except for IP authentication. So so other DNS attacks would work as well.
I am surpised that the most widely used network file system implementation for linux and most posix OSes has no real authentication. There *has* been authentication built in the protocol since version 3, but last time I checked, it was not supported on the linux. I was told by one guy working on the project that the problem was that there's no crypto in the kernel.
I used secure NFS on Solaris 8 for a while but I constantly lost the mounts. That but be fixed now, I don't know.
Use AFS, CVS, rsync, intermezzo, or something. But I would stay away from NFS.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Good point.
I was thinking more about the hardware failure issue.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Yep. Unified access to e-mail via IMAP is definitely the linchpin of a good arrangement.
I've been trying to deal with the same problems as you for several years. I have a Mac running Mac OS X, Windows PC, Linux server, and a NeXT around my desk. I have two large hard drives. One is in the Mac and that holds my home directory, and the Linux machine has all my MP3s. My home is exported via NFS and is mounted on the Linux box and on the NeXT so I always have live access to my files. The Windows box only does my TV program and Kazaa, so I'm content to simply have it use FTP to copy files back and forth (I haven't found a decent Windows NFS program.)
It all gets the job done, and it all works smoothly. Printing is done by IP printing to my big 'ol LaserJet. All the mail is kept either on my server at school, or on the cyrus server on the Linux box. It's a delight =)
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
There's this great standard for sharing files over the internet called the World Wide Web. Perhaps you've heard of it?
Seriously -- run a webserver + WebDAV on each of your machines. Then you can read/write from anywhere, and with any platform.
Systems like YouServ/uServ provide a webserver, access control, and mirroring/replication support in a single package. This way as long as only some of your machines are online, the data from every machine remains accessible. Unfortunately the system is not available for general public use, but the system may be in open source soon.
That's what it's for, right?
Seriously, I think it would be great if there was a P2P backup system. Private files could be encrypted, and everything could be uploaded to multiple peers. Obviously some sort of trust system would have to be worked out, but it could work. Even if I just connected to myself and two or three real life friends with DSL connections, it'd be great to have my files accessible everywhere, almost all the time.
I have two large drives sitting on a Linux box doing RAID mirroring. For remote access, I use ssh/scp. For local access from other Linux machines, I use NFS, and for Windows machines, SMB.
. music/singletracks/cache1/files.mp3.v ideos/ ..
The point is, everything is stored and "backed up" centrally, but accessed using a different mechanism depending on where I'm at when I need my data. Since I don't delete files accidentally, mirroring works fine for a backup - I'm really only concerned with drive failure.
I then structure the directories according to type of file. I've got a documents directory where I keep anything I create myself. Specific projects that require multiple files generally go under documents/projectname. I've got a music directory, and many subdirectories under it:
music/fullalbums/artistname/albumname/files.mp3
music/music
Etc. Then software. apps/isos. apps/windows. apps/linux. And so on, and so forth.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Use the excellent rsync from Paul Makerras (of pppd fame) and Andrew Tridgell (samba team) in combination with OpenSSH and SSH for windows (both based on Tatu Ylonen's work; OpenSSH is maintained by and expert team including Markus Friedl and the recently monkey-cracked Dug Song, among others).
Set up your accounts to rsync-upload changes to whichever server is most secure when you log out, and use a cron job on that server to rsync-download to all the other servers nightly. You can make a tar backup part of the system also.
You will have to remember what's going on so you don't modify the same file differently on two different systems within 24 hours. If you want to overcome that shortcoming by making this work on an immediate sync basis rather than periodically, you'll need something like SGI's fam (included with recent linux distros) to trigger the updating processes.
You should already be 90% there if you have your ssh keys set up for passwordless login. Passwordless PKI logins are not significantly less secure than passworded logins in most situations (granted hostile system management can get you, but the BOFH can trojan your login anyway).
Lots of people use this technique to sync CVS trees over slow links. Rsync is very efficient for that kind of thing (large volume of files, low number of changed bytes).
First, I try to adhere loosely to the FHS for ideas on overall organization. Even though it's mostly intended for POSIX systems, following their philosophy will really help you separate your data from your platform-dependent program files and libraries.
Most of my important stuff goes on the Linux server in /home (on an IDE software RAID1). However, I try to limit files in here to stuff that's absolutely essential to keep the size down. I occasionally mirror this offsite to my friends' servers with rsync (with the private stuff pgp encrypted). I try to make browser caches, etc. symlinks to dirs in /tmp . Try to keep only the stuff you created yourself in here.
I keep media and downloads on a plain partition under /home/ftp/pub (which is also symlinked from the http document root). That way, all my computers can easily get access to music and installers and junk.
Samba helps win32 boxes access the /home and /tmp directories.
NFS exports /home to the other UNIXen, as well as /usr for the other machines with the same CPU arch. It should be acceptable to export /usr/share to other UNIXen with different architectures.
I'd like to set up CODA, since it seems to support more different kinds clients than Intermezzo. These support disconnected operation and are good for laptops. For the meantime, I just use rsync to mirror home dirs onto my laptop, though (and just keep track of stuff that I change on the road manually :/ )
No thoughts on how to combine everything into a distributedFS so you could have parts of, say, a music archive living over several machines. There are several projects for Linux-only (PVFS) or Win32-only (more advanced network-neighborhoods). I'd say your best bet for convenience is just to make sure everything is visible from your one server and reexport it from there (invest in a switch so it doesn't deadlock your network). Until better DFSes exist, though, I think you'll get better performance and less confusion from running everything from one beefed-up server with a RAID (or two if you want failover).
Here's my situation: I have a dual-booting Linux/Win98 machine at home, a Win98 laptop, a Linux server sitting in some network in a galaxy far, far away; and a bunch of other computers around the world.
At one point, managing all my data (I would change a bit here, and a bit there, then try to copy and synchronize by hand) was manageable, but I got real tired of it real fast. I considered putting together a CVS server, and then synchronizing that way, but it's really overkill and not a very user-friendly solution anyway.
Enter Unison. Now I just have a few directories designated as shared, and they get synchronized by Unison automatically. At home, my data is on a FAT partition, which is accessible to both Linux and Win98.
The good thing about this is that since I synchronize with the laptop when I'm connected, I get to use my data even when I'm on the move - not so with NFS. And I get free backups as well - I do have roughly 2Gigs of data, which would be a hassle to backup any other way. Besides, if I took tape backups, I would have to manually carry them off-site in case of a fire; now Unison takes care of backups to and from my remote machines.
the connectivity and security are as versatile (or more so) as unix pipes; also you can write programs for it that run without change (really!) on any supported platform ('cos it provides an OS level view of everything rather than trying to shoehorn itself into the parent environment like java).
the security model is public-key based and because it's end to end, you don't need to worry at all about little things like 802.11 insecurities...
plus it's all small, clean and beautiful as befits something coming from CSRG at bell labs.
For those systems that are on all the time, select one system to be a common server, I personally recomend a Linux box, though xBSD or OSX may provide the features you need as well.
In your home directory, create a folder you are going to put your mount points in to mount the data stores you need.
On all the other systems, create a share that will contain the data you want to access "anywhere". On the central server Mount all of these shares in that sharesmount folder. This may be nfs or cifs as the architecture of the servers dictates.
As this is all mounted to your home directory, you can go to just about any system in the network and remotely mount all of your folders by Mounting your home folder from your primary server.
To remotely access this storage center, use either nfs over ssh, or build appropriate links into your web pages, and run a secure varient of apache.
I also recomend keeping your work data in a seprate storage area from your personal/home data. You may recall that Northwest Airlines successfully sued to get the personal computers of Flight Attendants who they believed co-operatively negotiated a sick-out strike. Keeping your personal data completely separate would reduce the likelyhood of loosing your entire computer setup if someone at work files a complaint that they believe you are doing something wrong.
There are other advantages to this kind of a setup. By centralizing your data storage tree, it is easier to perform backups, you will only need to backup the one server's home directory, tracing into the peripheral servers. If you wish to set up a thin client in a bedroom, or someplace where you don't want to have a lot of fans going, this gives you a platform ready made for your storage needs, as well as a reasonable terminal server. I think you get the idea.
-Rusty
You never know...
Keep your valuable files on a Linux machine (running on good hardware you can trust, a stable kernel, a journaling filesystem, and software RAID if you want to go that far). Do backups from there. Run NFS to serve all non-Windows clients. Run SAMBA to serve Windows clients.
/home/foo and on Windows it's H:\ - all the files are there.
Sharing data files is easy with the NFS/SAMBA combination - e.g. non-Windows machines mount my home directory as
Sharing software is less easy since none of the common UNIXy filesystem layouts really let you have binaries for multiple platforms available at once. There are unconventional layouts that do this, but you'll have to compile a lot of things yourself and mess with configure scripts a lot... I've given up on sharing binaries and libs; I just run Debian on as many of my systems as possible, and run a script now and then that ensures the same packages are installed on each machine.
For remote work I use SSH to set up a VPN. However, unless I'm on a very low-latency connection, I find it difficult to use a shell remotely, much less NFS. I usually end up manually rsync'ing the files I need.
This works well for me to keep about 30 accounts in sync, most of them just get a minimal checkout of my home directory (5 mb or so), while 3 or 4 get the whole home directory and rsynced files (5 gb). The CVS repository is about half a gigabyte in size these days.
Once something that allows proper file rename tracking, like subversion, comes along, I plan to stop using rsync alltogether, and just check all the files in.
As has been noted elsewhere in this thread, one of the key things is coming up with a consistent directory structure and sticking with it.
see shy jo
/porn/
/video/
/pics/
/gamez/
/app z/
/audio/
/rock/
/hiphop/
/jazz/
/warez/
/mp3/
oh filter, why must thee filter my comment
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
When I was still in school I tried to figure out some good way of being able to work on my research project at home and at school, or at least massage the code and the data in both places.
Being an engineer, I thought of a bunch of ways of setting up complicated distributed ways of doing this, but settled on just leaving the data in one place, and SSH'ing to that box.
The benefits of keeping it simple were:
1. No new work, which is good for the lazy^H^H^H^Hefficient among us.
2. Data coherency. If its only ever in one place its hard to mess up.
3. Backups are easy, since you're only backing up one data set.
4. Did I mention no new work?
As much as data sharing on a heterogenous network would have been nice (Linux box at home, Suns in the lab, Windows at my parent's place, iBook in my backpack), the marginal utility of that data sharing was low compared to the marginal cost of actually doing the work to make it happen.
My vote is for keeping the data in one place and remembering how much you love the terminal. Not a sexy solution, but it works.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
Okay, you *could* use some form of networked file system, but a) your laptop and other machines would need to be connected to use it, and b) I hope you are willing to fight to get a good implementation to work, and c) I hope you aren't playing with big files
I use rsync. I have ~/Makefile, 'make sync' works wonders. Here's the contents:
On the laptop:
Works like a charm
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
This is not a Fugazi
This question (or ones like it) has come up many times. This isn't the first time something like this has been posted on Slashdot. I'm currently looking at doing something like this myself and I'm obviously not the only one. While that lays the ground for a good open source project (ie- a distro that is set up for something like this, or a project that easily combines several tools to do this kind of thing), what I think we really need is a good HOW-TO. Maybe there already is one or are several related HOW-TO about setting up this type of file access. There have already been a number of good suggestions posted here on Slashdot. We need to get these and others together and put into a HOWTO so that it's not a research project every time someone starts exploring this idea of distributed data and somehow consolidating the mess. (And no, I'm not volunteering yet since I haven't done this yet and currently don't have the resources. But if something doesn't happen in a while, maybe I will...). If you know of a HOWTO or other site that covers this info, you should post it somewhere here.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Please don't call people names.
Instead, read this page:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~srb/openafs/
He-he, nice way to bring attention to this news item.
WebDAV is used practically by many Mac OS users in the form of the iDisk service on Apple's iTools network services. Being an open standard, there must be some commonality that makes it practical to set up WebDAV services on any or all boxes for basic file sharing, or even a common location. iDisk itself isn't the solution, of course, but it shows the practicality of a WebDAV solution.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
I'm not really sure what type of work your doing where you need access to your files... I can relate my knowledge on dealing with unison over the past year though.
I do a lot of back end web development. As such I usually like to copy the entire site down to a local machine, work on the system, upload to a test machine, test, and then move to a development machine. Unison has made my job a lot easier than it using a bunch of ssh scripts since unison automatically checks for changes and only copies over files with changes.
A sample script is as follows:
From my local file system $HOME/web/(website) I execute the following script
unison -auto -batch include ssh://user@somehost.com//www/(website)/include
unison -auto -batch www ssh://user@somehost.com//www/(website)/www
This script pulls all my programming work in include and the website accessable files www to my local system... I then work on the files and upload using the following script
unison -auto -batch include ssh://user@testhost.com//www/(website)/include
unison -auto -batch www ssh://user@testhost.com//www/(website)/www
I then check the coding and on the test host, when I get it to the point I want I upload it to the production machine...
If I have problems on the test host, I can go in and remove all files on my development system and pull a fresh copy of files from the live site...
Since I don't need to program and compile on different systems, just uploading the the test and production machines it works well.
Recently I took a trip and did not have access to my local system. I was able to borrow a windows system and after installing putting, winscp and unison I was up and running within 10-15 minutes at the remote site, which allowed me to get back to work.
The problem with using a remote mounting system is that you have to maintain network connectivity while working on files, not always an option, plus you are working with the live production files...
So basically I use unison just like a cp command except that it does not copy files that already are synced between systems and it automatically keeps my permissions sync'd as well.
Hope that helps
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
I keep all the porn in a seperate directory. That seems to work pretty well.
If you use cvs for this kind of thing, cron-jobs can make things a lot smoother when dealing with program settings and the like (I use it for stuff like my bookmarks). Just make the cron-job sync all your machines to a central repository at short intervals. That way you should be able to maintain consistent files in all machines, and if something goes wrong you can roll back to an earlier version.
Add a bit of clever scripting, and you might also handle whole dirs automagically (cvs works on individual files).
One word of caution: Be careful with binary files, and programs that restructure files, since thats not what cvs is made for (you can set files as binary though).
I agree with you. Your question though, was overly general.
.bashrc, environment, ssh directory, pgp keys, etc.
.bashrc .bashrc, put specific things in the separate files.
.cvsignore to make sure it only manages the files you want it to. .emacs macro, or shell prompt tweak? Edit one account, cvs commit, cvs update the rest.
There's really three (or more) different separate data issues that you have to deal with.
Like most, I have many accounts, and just manage them on the fly. My data is retrieved manually when I need it. SSH (and scp), VNC, etc. This usually does the job.
Not the easiest way to do it. Especially when I recently changed jobs and had to setup new data and profiles - I thought, there must be a better way to do it.
So, here's a breakdown of the problems, and suggested fixes.
Break it down into 3 separate sets of data:
1. Profile data - Your shell scripts,
2. Daily Documents - My Documents folder, data directory. Limit this to stuff you need in ALL locations (though you could have a personal and a work version...) and on a regular basis.
3. Archived files - Infrequently used, but you occasionally need to access them from various places.
Then, the problem becomes much simpler. Instead of a grand scheme to manage all three of these at once, you have three smaller, simpler problems.
Here's my suggestions:
1. Profile info - Wasn't originally my idea, but the best thing I've found is to use CVS to manage the files. You'll also have to setup your shell scripts to detect the OS / machine you are on and run OS / machine specific versions.
For example:
Detects OS, runs ~/.profile.d/linux, ~/.profile.d/win32, ~/.profile.d/macosx, etc.
Detects hostname, runs ~/.profile.d/hostname.
Put core stuff in the
The rest, usually doesn't change.
Add it all to CVS on a personal server. Then just checkout to each account you have. cvs update will keep it up to date if you change the master copy. You might need a special
Then, you have the same profile files on all of your machines. Got a new
2. Daily use Documents. This is a mix. Perhaps you could use a separate CVS repository. Or, use rsync and rdiff type backup sync programs. The key here is to keep this to a minimum. How much to you really need, and how much *must* be in sync between all your machines at all times. Again, this is fairly easy for a small number of documents, so don't let it get out of hand. If you don't use the file all the time, and don't need to maintain changes, then push it to archives.
This is the issue that most other posts address, so I won't get into too much detail. All those solutions are much easier with a small number of documents.
3. Archived files. This is probably what you were really asking about with regards to NFS and sharing files. These are the files you need every so often, stuff like your mp3 collection, downloaded software, extended (non category 2) documents, and the like.
For these, it depends on your setup and level of network access (the speed is important too). rsync might work if you need a locally cached copy, but this is much easier if you leave it in one place. Setup a gateway on your home network with IPSec or PPTP. Or, find WebDAV or some internet accessible filesystem you can use (NFS or SMB even, depends on your security needs). Then, connect to the central repository when you need these files.
This can be large, but keep it so that you don't need to synchronize frequently, and preferably only in one direction. You listen to your mp3's, but you don't change them frequently. Same with your downloaded tar/zip files of software you've collected. (Face it, having a single directory with cygwin, mozilla, etc - all the software you have installed at each location - is much easier than finding and downloading them all from their various sites each time.)
Or, for these files, if you really don't need them all the time, leave them on the central server, and scp them when you need them.
--
So, that pretty much covers it. I hope these suggestions are useful. There comes a time where managing it on the fly just gets too cumbersome. (You'll know that time - it usually happens right after you wipe out some vitally important data because you didn't synchronize the files.)
Beyond this, you can always add all kinds of stuff. Some examples: ACAP (a configuration file server, I use it with mulberry, my IMAP client. It lets me set preferences), Kerberos for common authentication, LDAP for an address book or netscape roaming profiles, the list goes on and on.
What would be nice is a set of scripts to help manage this.
Imagine, getting a new account and typing "pullprofile", and having your environment and data all retrieved, pulled from your central server. Then you could have login and logout scripts to synchronize the data, or just manually (possibly remotely if you forgot to sync before you left work) run them. A cron job to synchronize the big data store overnight.
I'll keep dreaming, and keep looking on freshmeat and sourceforge for a project like this. Maybe one day I'll get up the energy to start it myself, but don't count on it.
;-)
~Jonathan
Use AFS and kerberos. Works for mit.edu, Ericsson, kth.se and MANY others so it should work for you too.
http://www.openafs.org
http://www.pdc.kth.se/heimdal
My mom's office had the same types of problems so here's what I did:
:)
1. Set up samba on the reliable (linux) machine, with proper tape backup, etc.
2. Firewalled the segment (which included their desktops) with a WatchGuard SOHO router (about $500 for 25 user support, runs linux
3. Set up Mobile User VPN on the firewall, and any laptops that might travel out of the office.
Samba and SMB are not the world's fastest solutions, but it is nice to be able to have the directory browsing in winders and macos. Samba is easy to set up, my first install of a samba PDC only taking about 3-4 hours (and never touch it again). If you need real speed for transferring over large files, you can always use SSH and SCP (putty and pscp for windows, niftytelnet for mac). Just always attempt to maintain a central data server, back it up as needed, and you'll be successful in clearing the data clutter.
AntiChristX
Daring to remain below 5 karma indefinitely
Cost to me would be £0 - I need the MSDN Universal anyway, so it doesn't cost me anything extra to use more bits of it.
I'm sure a whole bunch of slashweenies will now accuse me of voluntarily paying a Microsoft tax, but I can assure you that I've made lots more money out of Microsoft than I've ever paid them, and I get a jolly good ROI on the subscription.
I really (really!) like Mail.app on Mac OS X. It's one of the reasons I kept my NeXTs for so long. It caches all of the messages locally, so I don't have to worry about connectivity. If I want to use the pleasant text-based options, they're still available.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
This response is dead on. The original asker needs a file server that speaks multiple protocols. Once you have a server, it is much easier to create the necessary ssh or ssl tunnels that you need for total security.
Trying to maintain coherency of data via replication across multiple machines is begging for trouble -- this is a hard problem that to my knowledge has not been solved in a clean, cheap way.
If you want to use NetInfo for Mac OS X, create a new port from the Open Darwin sources. There's a port of an old NetInfo server module for Linux floating around, but it's not what I'd call up to date.
A better choice would be to use OpenLDAP, as Mac OS X is designed to pull directory service info from an LDAP data source. Windows systems can also pull from a LDAP, as can Linux and *BSD and Solaris and so on.
--Paul
My supervisor swears by one of these things... He used to have a complete mess of redundant files all over the place and could never remember which was the most current. Now it's easy. The VST drive is the definitive version.
Of course, there is an outside chance that you could lose the drive or the data be destroyed, so make a habit of backing up (using rsync or something similar) on a weekly, or even nightly, basis to a more secure machine (a desktop, for example). You could probably set up a nightly cron job to run that would check to see if the drive is connected and backup if it is. That way, backups for you would be as simple as connecting the drive when you get home...
Well, let's say your working on a unix system and it crashes or loses its configuration and the network underneath it gets reconfigured. I find the best solution for moving data and preserving permissions is a tar pipe through ssh or rsh. Cpio and other stuff might work better since tar has problems for deep directories. But here's what I use:
But AFS looks cool. Does anyone know how secure it is?
Use imap for email clients and keep your email on the fileserver.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Where I work, there are Gigs of data stored
in massive Oracle SQL databases.
Obviously, if you are asking this question,
you don't need such a high powered system
as this (we have a big-iron Sun machine that
does the serving).
However, buying a powerful Dell Server, and
running Access on Win2K would give you a
decent SQL system to work with.
Applets can be written for any platform
which will all use SQL and can then translate
the results of the query into native stuff
for the computer its on.
Furthermore, look into Macromedia ColdFusion.
CF can be used to quickly create web-based
systems which interface with an SQL database
rediculously easy. (My department does just
this.)
You can use a web app and a database to
retrieve data and upload data, perform
authentication, all sorts of great stuff.
If you have enough disks to make 600GB with the 100% overhead of RAID1, I hate to think howmuch space you're wasting that you'd have free if you used something smarter like RAID5.
RAID5's overhead is a fraction of RAID1's overhead, and as long as you don't have a lot of drives fail at once (which is rare, and RAID isn't a replacement for backups anyways), you're much better doing anyways.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
None of us is in control of the technology we use.
I've long since given up reading the hardware specs for the processors I'm using and expecting to understand every wire on the circuit board and every byte of code in the PROM. (Yes, I used to do this.) It's just all too complicated, and one does wish to have some time left to use the stuff.
It all got too much for me when processors started caching stuff internally, so you could no longer see what they were doing by watching the data fetches with a logic analyser; it was at this point that you could no longer calculate how long a processor would take to do something, because the same instruction might take a different number of cycles depending on cache history; you had to just run the code several times and measure it.
So the fact that I don't have a copy of several million lines of source code that I have no desire at all to spend time reading doesn't bother me in the slightest.
Machines:
Dev box (PC - W2K/Linux)
Server (PC - Linux)
Firewall (PC - Linux)
Laptop (PC - W2K/Linux)
GF's machine (old Mac)
PDA (Psion 5)
All my working data lives on the server and is available to the other machines via Samba, NFS or netatalk. Backup via DDS3 on the server using afbackup, "minimal restore information" encrypted and mailed to a free webmail account so I can get to it if, say, the server catches fire.
Laptop has a directory under my ~ called "mirrored" which contains my current working set of stuff from the server. This is synced using unison whenever I come back from / head off on a trip to the office (I work from home 3 days a week).
GF has a home dir on the server which is visible on the mac desktop and has been told "put stuff here, it gets backed up, put stuff anywhere else, it's your problem."
Dev box and laptop are dual-boot linux/W2K, with a VMWare install running inside linux set up to boot from the physical W2K install, which can see both ~ on the host machine and on the server (if connected).
PDA syncs with Outlook (no email, just calendar and tasks) on the dev box - VMWare or real hardware, works just the same and the data is visible in both as it's the same physical drive.
Everything works very smoothly, except for:
- Unison which dies if it tries to use more than 64M of RAM to do the sync. This has only happened to me once, when trying to sync about 40-50,000 files in one go. For normal day-to-day jobs, I've never had a problem with it.
- The W2K VMWare session on the dev box losing the serial port occasionally, which means I need to reinstall the port or boot into native W2K before I can sync the PDA. Not really a problem as it only happens very occasionally.
What would Lemmy do?
Heh, I actually remember your posts to the OpenAFS lists. You're right, the server software doesn't quite work on OS X, and the Windows version is kinda dodgy. But, you only need the client software to actually access AFS-space, which works fine on both OS X and Windows. Put the server software on a couple of UNIX machines, and access the filespace from any OpenAFS-supported platform.
This is not a Fugazi
It's funny, but they support IMAP too. So does mutt, in fact. There's no reason to not use IMAP just because you only provide shell access... and to follow Ashley's line, if you have a laptop, then IMAP with locally cached messages gives you much better access to your mail if you travel.
And, if you ever provide mail for people in a different state or country, a mail system that's not dependent upon a constant and fast connection to your machine is pretty much necessary.
Take the taste test: consider setting up a super-small machine to host your mail for a little while, on IMAP; configure vm to use IMAP; go ahead and download the imap-utils package from UWash (it gives you things like icat, that cats messages from the server). See if you notice a real difference or not. A little Sparc IPX would be enough for this, with a tiny 3-4G drive. Just give it a try... heck, email me if you need help.
--Matthew