John> We've got two NetApps, an F740 and an F87. The big 'un is in our John> US office, and the little guy is in our UK office.
John> We've got a T1 between our sites, and of course the performance John> sucks for those who access files on the other side of the pond.
Yup, it's going to suck.
John> I'm wondering about possible mirroring options. From what I've John> heard, all of them are one-way. There is no such thing as a John> two-way style of mirror, is there? For example, if a user opens John> a file on one side, it would lock the file on both filers, and John> then when he saves it, it is synced to both sides.
Two way mirroring like this is hard to do. You're best cheap best is a pair of rsync's running both ways. I'd probably have it called /to-uk/... on the US side, and /to-us/... on the UK side, with Rsyncs going to /from-uk/... and /from-us/... as their destinations. Just run an rsync once an hour to keep them upto date. Or more often if you watch for new files.
John> Otherwise, the only thing I can do, really, is set up particular John> directories to mirror over, and so we'd have a read-only copy of John> the local folder on the other side, and vice versa. Not really John> the most useful thing for collaboration.
John> Anyone have any good solutions to such a problem?
It's hard. I'd probably setup local accounts for the smaller site's user on the main site, and have them use VNC sessions ontop of the FreeNX server (www.nomachine.com) to keep down the bandwidth requirements. Then all your work happens at one site where the bandwidth isn't a problem.
I'd give you more details, but I haven't setup FreeNX for testing quite yet, too busy with other work.
John John Stoffel - Senior Staff Systems Administrator - System LSI Group Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. - http://www.toshiba.com/taec john.stoffel@taec.toshiba.com - 508-486-1087