[ale] Two offices, one data pool

[Pat Regan]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:30:12 -0500
"Michael B. Trausch" <mike at trausch.us> wrote:

> The biggest thing is that there are a small handful of
> documents---roughly 500 of them---that have a very high (near 1)
> probability of being opened and edited at the same time in both
> offices. Because the offices' duties overlap significantly, it has to
> be possible to have the same sort of file locking semantics that a
> single Samba server provides to a single office.

MS's terminology is escaping me at the moment but this should be a
problem that is already solved with a window's server.  They have some
sort of replicated file shares that do precisely what you want.  I
haven't used windows or samba in a few years.

I used to work for a company with about 90 employees.  About 1/3 of
them were in a single office.  The rest were spread out across a few
states in small offices with 1-3 people each.  While I was working
there I connected everything with a routed vpn using openvpn.

Around the time when I was leaving my replacement wanted to set up some
more windows servers running whatever the replication technology MS
uses is called.  He had it running between two servers before I left
but it wasn't going to be cost effective to by MS server licenses and
a piece of hardware to run it on for all 25 offices.  Not to mention
the extra overhead of maintaining them.

I hate to recommend an MS product.  I know there are a whole slew of
open source projects that replicate data from the block level and the
file system level.  I have absolutely no idea how well they interact
with windows desktops.

Pat