Gordon Dexter on 4 Sep 2009 10:24:48 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] data in $HOME


Richard Freeman wrote:
JP Vossen wrote:
  
Now I'm finally getting my wife to try moving over to TB and FF on 
Ubuntu, perhaps with some Picasa (yuck) and OpenOffice thrown in.  How 
can I most seamlessly connect her to her data from Ubuntu Hardy on her 
laptop?  (Yes, Hardy, I like LTS versions.  But UbuntuOne sounds cool.)

    

I think you've hit on one of the biggest gaps I see in linux - 
networking support.  The only really well-integrated networking option 
in linux is NFS and it is pretty lousy for a lot of reasons.  I think 
that samba is probably your most practical option - to be honest samba 
is probably better than NFS for sharing data even between two linux 
systems under many scenarios.  Of course, samba is lousy when it comes 
to permissions/symlinks/etc (unless of course you're talking about 
between windows machines).

Another option that wasn't mentioned is openafs.  In theory that 
filesystem offers everything that you're interested in (offline access 
(read-only), windows and linux drivers, etc).  However, it is pretty 
complex to set up - I messed with it and ended up giving up.  I really 
was interested in using it for my roaming windows profiles since 
transferring them across the network really slows login/logoug.  If they 
were stored on openafs then they could be cached locally and the 
filesystem manages the cache so that data isn't retransmitted unless it 
really is stale.

If anybody is feeling really daring it might be something worth looking 
at.  There is a ton of documentation out there, but it is really old. 
It also requires delving into Kerberos.  Not for the feint of heart.
What I would suggest is getting a Windows program that lets you mount SSH filesystems as a drive letter.  For $40 I got a license to a program called Expandrive (formerly SFTPDrive) and it works great and allows easy mounting of any Linux filesystem to a Windows drive lette.  It works great for me, and comes with a free online drive (or did when I bought it anyways).  Look into it.

--Gordon

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