synchronization problems and challenges

[Todd Slater]

On 5/3/06, Eric S. Johansson <esj at harvee.org> wrote:
> 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.

Why not? Won't unison handle as many conf files as you want to throw
at it? I would think the hardest part would be keeping the same
version of unison on each machine. Maybe I'm missing something here,
but I think unison is what you want.

Todd