synchronization problems and challenges

Eric S. Johansson esj at harvee.org
Wed May 3 23:55:59 UTC 2006


problem 1:

here's what I'm living with.  I have two windows workspaces (one 
desktop, one portable, both with speech recognition) I have the portable 
flip side running ubuntu, my production linux server (e-mail, web), and 
my "too dangerous to show to the real world" linux server.  Occasionally 
I have a few really remote servers I deal with that will need very 
specific directory synchronization.

While I don't need to synchronize the entire workspace between all of 
them, I do need to have sets of files synchronized between all of them. 
  What I'm looking for some tool that will do bidirectional 
synchronization's on files invisibly and automatically without complaint 
*unless* there is a merge problem and at which point, it would be 
entirely excusable to put up the user interface dialog.  Failing that, I 
want the dialogue to do the synchronization to come up once when I 
login, and second one I logout or tell it to.

fyi, only place that has a graphical user interface is the Windows 
machines.  I could in theory export X11 clients to my Windows desktop 
but since ScamSoft abused speech-recognition doesn't work with X11 
anymore, I've given up using X11 apps unless they are really special.

I am comfortable with using a central server to coordinate all of the 
changes but unfortunately, I don't think unison can handle the number of 
targets I'm talking about on the "client" end.  I would love to be 
proven wrong.

so given the problem, any suggestions on desktop synchronization between 
Windows, Windows, Linux, Linux, and Linux?


problem 2: USB flash.  It's formatted with fat 32 so I can read it on 
Windows but its permission is defaulting to 600 instead of something 
like 755 which is what I use in the rest of my files.  any ideas on how 
to change the default permissions for mounting USB flash?

thanks for any idea!

--- eric





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