Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: User-Friendly, Version-Preserving File Sharing For Linux?
petherfile writes: I've been a professional with Microsoft stuff for more than 10 years and I'm a bit sick of it to be honest. The one that's got me stuck is really not where I expected it to be. You can use a combination of DFS and VSS to create a file share where users can put whatever files they are working on that is both redundant and has "previous versions" of files they can recover. That is, users have a highly available network location where they can "go back" to how their file was an hour ago. How do you do that with Linux?
This is a highly desirable situation for users. I know there are nice document management things out there that make sharepoint look silly, but I just want a simple file share, not a document management utility. I've found versioning file systems for Linux that do what Microsoft does with VSS so much better (for having previous version of files available.) I've found distributed file systems for Linux that make DFS look like a bad joke. Unfortunately, they seem to be mutually exclusive. Is there something simple I have missed?
This is a highly desirable situation for users. I know there are nice document management things out there that make sharepoint look silly, but I just want a simple file share, not a document management utility. I've found versioning file systems for Linux that do what Microsoft does with VSS so much better (for having previous version of files available.) I've found distributed file systems for Linux that make DFS look like a bad joke. Unfortunately, they seem to be mutually exclusive. Is there something simple I have missed?
FreeNAS will do all of that shiny stuff. And snapshots, too.
Look at ZFS. Supports snapshots, SMB and NFS. And you can show the snapshots as a read-only directory to users.
use VMS, it's built in
TOPS-20 had it too
yearning already for the lost technology of the 1970s
Closed as off topic. Try serverfault.com.
Closed as off topic. Try superuser.com.
Closed as off topic. Try unix.stackexchange.com.
Closed as off topic. Try....
Take a look at the features list at https://owncloud.org/features/. It seems to have what you want. I played with it a couple of years ago and it was easy to set up then. Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to try it in production.
What is this of which you speak? Can someone expand on these thing?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Search Google for WebDAV auto-versioning.
I have set up (and used for many years) a WebDAV file share served by Apache (with an SVN backend). It can be used as an SVN repository (with checkin comments, etc.) or used as a simple remote file share that automatically creates revisions for the changes. I have used various WebDAV clients (built in to Linux, Mac, Windows) to access and modify the contents of the files.
Hope that gives you another area to explore.
Depending on your usage, I'd recommend http://seafile.com/en/download...
We were using owncloud, but at least at last check a non-admin user needed a lot of things done by an admin on their behalf, and seafile let's people make their own groups and such.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
make sharepoint look silly
Sharepoint needs absolutely zero help to look silly.
Of MS world of products, sharepoint is perhaps the worst festering thing they got.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You can store the database file there, just don't let the power go out mid operation or make a copy of an active database's file(s) and expect it to work.
In other words, exactly like how it is now.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
rsync with the --compare-dest option will give changed files, and --link-dest will give whole file trees at set times.
You can do it pretty simple, or quite complicated, depending on your needs and preferences.
rsync --link-dest makes a new tree with the current time, using only enough space for the directory tree and the changed files. On my box, I use it in a cron that runs every 5 minutes and cycles through my backup list. If any of them are older than the interval, it fires off the backup script specific to that type of connection (local LVM, nfs, CIFS/SMB, ssh, etc).
A second cron then prunes those directories so that I've got fewer copies as I go back in time. An example would be pulling a copy every 15 minutes and keep every copy for 2 weeks, keep one from each hour for a month, one per day for a year, one per month for 10 years, and one per year forever.
This can be easily adapted to other schemes. --compare-dest will make a tree with just the changed files, which you can then gather up and sort into the archival tree. Run a second (plain) rsync to sync up the comparison directory when done.
See that "Preview" button?
Contrary to popular rumors, there are a number of ways to do what you want. I can't vouch for all of these combinations working and wouldn't be too optimistic about tackling some of them. The more advanced stuff can take quite a while to ramp up to speed.
If you don't mind FUSE as an intermediary, there's gitfs that uses git as a file system (which is kind of is anyway, beyond being just a VCS). It creates a new version on every file close. You can point it to a git remote on the same machine or across a network which lives on any filesystem.
You already found that there are some non-mainline kernel modules for filesystems like next3, ext3cow, or tux3 that do versioning on write. NILFS is actually in the kernel these days (since 2.6.something) . More information about NILFS2 shows that it's somewhat slow but that it is in fact a stable, dependable file system.
Subversion has a feature that you can put WebDAV in front of it, mount the WebDAV as a filesystem somewhere, and every write creates a new revision of the file in SVN. That gets you networked and versioned. This works similarly to gitfs but uses WebDAV. You could if you wanted use dav2fs in front of that to treat it like a normal file system again.
You can then share any of these over SMB with Samba. Or you can shared them via NFS.
If you need really high-end, fast, replicated network filesystems you can use any of the clustered storage systems that will use a storage node's underlying files with any of these below that, but that will put your revisions underneath everything else rather than on top. Then there's using something like gitfs with the remote on top of, for example, DRDB, XtreemFS, or Ceph (for example even across CephFS which presents Ceph as a normal POSIX filesystem). This latter option puts your revisions closer to the user and then each revision gets replicated.
I've personally never used some of the more exotic combinations listed here. You could in theory put NILFS2 on LVM with DRBD as the physical layer (since DRBD supports that) and then serve that file system via Samba (CIFS) or NFS which I would expect to work well enough if slowly.