[olug] Network drives on a laptop?

[Jeff Hinrichs - DM&T]

fusesmb - http://www.ricardis.tudelft.nl/~vincent/fusesmb/

it works great for me.

-jeff

On Jan 7, 2008 3:03 PM, Christopher Cashell <topher-olug at zyp.org> wrote:
> On Jan 7, 2008 2:02 PM, Luke -Jr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:
> > On Monday 07 January 2008, Christopher Cashell wrote:
> > > AutoFS
> >
> > AutoFS addresses a completely different problem, IMO.
> > I use it so I can access /mnt/net/ssh/HOSTNAME without bothering to setup
> > every single HOSTNAME individually.
>
> I wouldn't say it's a completely different problem.  It's not a
> perfect solution, I agree, but I'm not sure there's anything out there
> that comes closer.  I probably wouldn't recommend it for mounting
> /home on a laptop, but for random general shares where you won't be
> accessing them constantly, AutoFS fits well enough.
>
> > It does not address the problem of an interrupted connection. Think tail -F.
> > This will keep the fs mounted despite autofs.
>
> Yes, that's correct.  It acts by trying to prevent interrupted
> connections by taking down connections that aren't actively in use.
> If you leave a program running that is accessing a file on the remote
> share, then AutoFS won't unmount the connection.  Unfortunately, short
> of killing the process and then unmounting remote shares when the
> laptop sleeps, you're not going to find much that will take care of
> this problem (especially if you're concerned with data loss, which
> will occur in the above situation).  This is primarily a limitation on
> the inability to unmount a disk that's in use.
>
> And, if you can't unmount it, then you're back where you started, with
> stale connections that may or may not work after your laptop wakes up.
>  You're pretty much dependent on the robustness of NFS/CIFS and their
> implementations, and hoping that they handle reconnecting or timing
> out gracefully (for NFS, using TCP can help with this a little bit).
>
> If that's not good enough, then you're getting into either AFS, or
> some other distributed/disconnected sharing system.  These tend to be
> complicated and difficult to make work right, although if anyone
> has/does, I'd love to hear more about it.  Alternately, you can do an
> indirect sync approach.  Operate on a local cached copy that
> periodically syncs with the remote copy.  There' s a number of tools
> out there that can do this, or it can be scripted.  Depending on your
> shares, though, it may be wildly impractical.  For example, I've seen
> it work well for /home on a laptop, but I'd definitely not want to use
> it for my remote /media share which contains many gigs of mp3's.
>
> --
> Christopher
>
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-- 
Jeff Hinrichs
Dundee Media & Technology, Inc
jeffh at dundeemt.com
402.218.1473