I'm absolutely delighted by this - I'd long since given up hope of a mainstream vendor looking at a cached client approach rather than trying to insist on either thick or thin.
The issue of backing up user home directories from mobile devices in mentioned in the PDF, but I'd be very interested in hearing about approaches for dealing with syncing shared data stores.
With a home directory or private data store basic sync works if it can be made transparent to the user, and/or integrated into the GUI (Off-line Files on MS Windows, Mac iDisk).
Writable shared data stores presumably require some form of reconciliation or version control for multiple off-line copies to be handled smoothly. I suppose that one solution might be to wrap access to a version control system into the standard GUI so that the functionality becomes accessible to office workers; another might be to use a database-backed system like Storage, which could replicate.
How are people dealing with this issue on their networks now ? What do we think would be the "Just Works" solution in the context of Stateless Linux ?
(I've seen the problem, but I don't know the answer...)
-- Stuart Ellis s.ellis@fastmail.co.uk