[NCLUG] A *nix DFS alternative?

[Stephen Warren]

DJ Eshelman wrote:
> I think I may have posed this question before but I'm still having
> trouble believing Microsoft has the only solution.
>
> Here's the situation:
>
> I want to start a business for my wife that will service professional
> photographers and others that want to have photos professionally
> retouched and, hopefully also sold as a storage solution (we'll get to
> that later- Storage as a Service for photographers and AV studios that
> have high storage needs but low budgets- not exactly IronMountain's
> niche market).
>
> We want to have the main server (facing clients) at my office where we
> have bandwidth to spare and can handle upwards of 20 Mbit/sec transfers,
> not to mention be on a good Xen (or maybe ESXi) server, so I can sell
> this reliably and scalably down the road.
>
> What I want at home is twofold- both the ability to have near-immediate
> bit-level sync over a VPN (preferably with good compression as RAW
> photographs tend to be quite bulky), and the ability to work directly
> from this server at home independently of the main server at the
> office.  It's a branch server, in a sense, but with different
> permissions/user accounts and completely isolated file storage.  This
> gives a good level of backup/redundancy as I can just do delta backups.

I should probably read the whole thread, but I use unison for this kind of
thing. It is basically a multi-master rsync.

In the past, I've had file-stores on two servers sync using a cron job
that ran every 10 minutes; almost immediate. As I think others have noted,
inotify/similar could decrease latency here.

More recently, I share our photo tree across 3 laptops and a server using
manual unison invocations.