On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 13:40 -0400, Bryan K. Wright wrote: > > This sounds fine, but please don't REQUIRE a graphical interface > to use the hardware. I have lots of researchers who ssh into group servers > and use USB disks, shared tape drives, printers, etc. Certainly, you will always be able to do things "manually" > On another topic, the overview notes that disaster recovery for > laptops requires that the laptop home directory be backed up often -- > "perhaps whenever the laptop connects to the intranet". Toward this end, > will the stateless project incorporate support for network block devices? > A local disk in a "RAID 1" array with a remote block device sounds like > a good way to ensure that an up-to-date remote copy of files is maintained > while the user is connected. When the connection is broken, the remote > half of the mirror would be unavailable, and the local disk would be used. > On reconnection, the halves of the mirror would resync. That's a clever idea. Dan Reed has some code written that's a bit simpler approach - it just rsyncs the homedir periodically. The hard questions on homedir backup seem to be around how it interfaces to an "industrial strength" backup solution, i.e. we can keep the homedir synced to a network share pretty easily, but how does that interact with incremental backups and so forth. Havoc
