[UFO Chicago] syncing multiple workstations to one master

[Jesse Becker]

There are several tools that can be used for syncronizing systems.  I've used a few, written one, and am constantly looking for others.

What I really *want* is something that can efficiently do this via multicast, but I've not found something works for my situation at present.

So a few things, off the top of my head:

1) bittorrent.  If your datasets are not huge, and are easily confined to a single directory structure, bittorrent can be a very efficient way to push files around a network.  Similar P2P programs also work.  I tried using it on several hundred GB of infrequently changing data, and found that the checksum calculation to generate the .torrent file took longer than the actual syncronization itself.

2) For simple disk cloning on identical hardware--a computer lab, for example, there's the "dolly" program:  http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/cops/patagonia/dolly.html    It's pretty simple, but does what it claims.  There are probably better (i.e. more robust) programs out there at this point.  I also just found a reference to "dolly+", but have never used it:  http://corvus.kek.jp/~manabe/pcf/dolly/

3)  Rsync.  I've a perl program that takes a list of hosts, and builds a recursive tree of sync targets and uses ssh to call rsync for replication.  The first host is the initial "seed", which is used to populate a client.  One a client is done, it becomes a seed host, and can accept other clients.  If anyone is interested, let me know, and I'll send the script off-list.

4) There are lots of other programs, both open source and commercial.  Wikipedia probably has a nice comparison page too. :)

-- 

Jesse Becker

--- On Wed, 8/31/11, Calvin Pryor <calvinpryor at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Calvin Pryor <calvinpryor at gmail.com>
Subject: [UFO Chicago] syncing multiple workstations to one master
To: ufo at ufo.chicago.il.us
Date: Wednesday, August 31, 2011, 11:58 PM

Hello all,
I know I read something somewhere about a Linux/Debian type tool that will sync multiple computers to one "master". You just make changes to the master (updates, etc) and the changes are magically propagated to all others computers set up to do so. 

What am I thinking of ? 



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