1999-03-24-06:16:55 Tom:
[...] Yes, it would be nice if NACs supported mirroring as well. That would make them extremely high end boxes.
NACs supporting mirroring, would that be something like Auspex's ServerGuard? I've run that, and though we had a pretty long shakedown time, it eventually stabilized and worked wonderfully well. It's a terrific piece of work, but it pretty clearly reveals that doing network-distributed file server mirroring without a vicious performance hit is _way_hard_.
From the beginning, they were hoping that their solution would scale well to mirroring over a WAN, but last I heard that was still a hope for the future and not a delivered reality.
We used, and loved, ServerGuard within the office, but for off-site replication we settled on rsync. Cool SW that. For a good time, use a find...|cpio -pdl run to build a hard-link tree at the target of replication, then rsync to update that hard-link tree. Rsync breaks the hard links to the files that change. You end up with a really efficient delta snapshot view that you can use for easy user-accessible backups. Just tell your users to e.g.
cd /backup/1998/06/12/their/home/directory
They like that. It appeals. Oh, and back to your original comment, Yupper, if ServerGuard is any example, that would indeed make them extremely high end boxes:-).
-Bennett