I have a Cooker box and an 8.1 box in my network. I have enabled fam on my 8.1 box to allow network connections from the fam on my Cooker box so that I can avoid polling files over NFS for changes to be reflected in Nautilus on the Cooker box. (Let's not get into the security issues of this right now please)
It does not all seem to work however. The fam on my Cooker box does successfully connect to the fam on the 8.1 box and it does get information about file status changes from the 8.1 box but only when the fam on Cooker sends a request (polls the fam on the 8.1 box) for it. I had discovered all of this because when I enabled remote connection on the fam on 8.1 box I was not seeing file status changes in Nautilus on the Cooker box any more. They were working fine when remote connection was disabled and the fam on the Cooker box was polling the files over NFS to the 8.1 box. It was only enabling remote connections on the 8.1 box that stopped Nautilus from displaying file status updates, so... I have an strace attached to both of the fams and noticed that the fam on the 8.1 box was doing nothing. It was just sitting waiting in a select. It was only when I hit Refresh in Nautilus (on the Cooker box) that I saw the fam on the Cooker box (where Nautilus is running) send requests to the 8.1 box (which made the fam on the 8.1 box do some work of course) and then the Nautilus display updated. This polling of the fam on the 8.1 box by the fam on the Cooker box seems to defeat the purpose of fam. It was my impression that when a "client" fam connects to a "server" fam it gives it a list of files that it wants info on and then waits for the server to send messages about changes. Is this not correct? Why bother enabling client/server fam if the client just polls the server? b. -- Brian J. Murrell
