On Wed, 21 Nov 2001 at 17:38, Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla wrote:
> Well, having a central file system also means having a single point of
> failure.  Make sure you make regular and frequent backups lest the
> failure of the central server for any reason whatsoever cause an
> apocalypse for your organization!

I agree. For now this system works for us, but I know that this is not the
epitomy of data storage. ;>

> And please note that this will probably not properly scale to much
> larger organizations and networks, although for the networks that
> almost all of us manage, my cousin's system will be more than
> adequate.  It also doesn't work very well for geographically-dispersed
> collaborative work (CVS will probably work better for this).

Dido, we're considering a setup that I think fits your term
"geographically-dispersed collaborative [net]work". Perhaps you (and some
other PLUGgers more experienced in this area) can help me out with
conceptualizing how things will work.

We just finished renovating our old office in Makati, and we will soon
open this as our second factory store, and our sales hub for the Makati
area. Initially it will be just a store, with perhaps a few kiosks that
connect to the office via dial-up for browsing and email. Soon, however,
it will have a 256kbps connection to the Internet via PLDT DSL.

While they won't need access to all the data on our central server
immediately, it would be great if we could set up a server there that will
essentially mirror the data we have here.

Plain old mirroring is not a problem. rsync can handle the job really
well, and I can do the initial dumping of data (between 10 to 15 GB for
the data hosted by Samba and our PostgreSQL and LDAP databases) via LAN.
The user database can probably be done via LDAP's own replication system
(is this encrypted?) and the SQL can probably be copied out straight.

It's having two working copies that are kept in sync that are more
challenging to me. The ultimate goal is to be able to either go here or
there (or any other such similar set up "hub") and work on any file as if
you were in the main office.

I read up on rsync last night (although I've been using it for longer) and
am under the impression that it's a one-way system (ie:  synchronizing one
copy with another possibly more recent copy).

I am not very familiar with CVS, yet. I've only used it so far to keep my
copies of Horde and XFS in-sync with the main repositories. Do you think
CVS can handle keeping two large repositories of data that are modified by
various people at various stages of the day in sync?

Another possibility that I'm looking into is something like Intermezzo
<http://www.inter-mezzo.org/>. Unfortunately Intermezzo doesn't seem to be
ready for primetime yet, but the documents on the web are interesting.

Hmm ... any thoughts? :)

 --> Jijo

--
Federico Sevilla III  :: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Network Administrator :: The Leather Collection, Inc.
GnuPG Key: <http://jijo.leathercollection.ph/jijo.gpg>

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