Way to make distant servers to appear to have the same data ?

[David Timms]

Phil Meyer wrote:
> David Timms wrote:
>> What is the most effective, most robust way to allow servers that are 
>> quite distant, and on slow networks "appear" to have the same content ?
>>
>> In my example, the content is read/write at 4 sites. Hopefully the 
>> system should make caching possible for files that were originally at 
>> another site. If a file were not already cached, then it would get 
>> loaded across the slow network.
>>
...
> In the olden days, we used to require users to 'promote' content from a 
> staging server to a production server.  The act of 'promotion' included 
> an rsync to the remote servers, and then a 'roll out' of that content at 
> the same moment on all servers once all had acknowledged receipt of the 
> promotion.  It was all automated and not hard to do.
> 
> Steps:
> 
> rsync staging/content primary::staging/content
> 
> wait for completions
> 
> on all servers at once:
> 
> mv content content.$$ ; mv staging/content content
> 
> roll back was easy
> 
> mv content.NNNNN content
> 
> I have been out of that game for a few years, but it was easy enough then.
> 
> Now days you have much more dynamic content, more middle ware, broader 
> use of server based cookies, etc.
> 
> It can be difficult to insure that all of that data is preserved across 
> remote servers.
> 
> But for fairly static content, the old way should work just fine.
So, with this method, would you keep multiple versions of the "content" 
? For a large amount of data, this would seem to require very large disk 
space.

Or would you promote each small folder etc individually ?

Can the system automate this, or does a user need to run some script to 
activate it ? How would you instigate the script if using winXP only 
clients connecting via samba ?

DaveT.