Unison Support?

Thanks for the suggestion, I really like what I've read about it.

Uses the rsync block-level diff algorithm, but also supports 2-way sync directly, and supposedly can even merge changes at both ends into the same file!

And native binary available for Windows, so no need for Cygwin...

+1 !

Resources:

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/articles/usingUnison.html

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7712

Yeah, the only downside is that it appears that the developers have decided to move on to other projects.

Hopefully someone motivated in the F/OSS community will pick it up, because it has some real potential.

-a

I've started to use Unison to synchronize some directories and it works amazingly well.
I think it would fit perfectly well to the ReadyNas as it would allow one to synchronize many machines with one master (the nas), which is the recommended way to synchronize more than 2 hosts.

+1

An extra vote for Unison. It is a brilliant program for two way sync, uses the rsync algoritm to save bandwidth use and is cross platform. I would get a lot more use out of my ReadyNAS NV if it supported Unison.

Hello,

I also strongly encourage this idea. As it stands now, to do 2-way synchronization I have to use one of my Macs to provide the interface (it goes thru the NAS) b/c the NAS can't provide unison services directly.

Folks at Infrant ... is there an effort to incorporate a unison server into the Nas units? If so, what's the status on that?

Thx,

--b

With RAIDiator 4 and SSH access, you can implement Unison service on the ReadyNAS.

Can you please provide more detailed information on how one would begin to go about doing this?

Do I need to compile things on the Nas to make this work? I get the impression that the Nas CPU is too slow to do much of that kind of thing (e.g. http://....).

Thanks a bunch,

--b

Check out the ReadyNAS Beta Forum.

I checked with one of the Unison developers...although they may be working on other projects, they also use Unison on a daily basis, and things continue to get fixed. It's a good solution...if only I could get it to work with the ReadyNAS.

I tried it by mounting the ReadyNAS and running Unison in local mode, but since I'm running Mac OS X, I found:

1) Can't use SMB/CIFS, because resource forks and extended attributes are not supported

2) Can't use NFS, same reason

3) Can't use AFP, because there is a bug in the AFP implementation on the ReadyNAS that doesn't set permissions correctly in all cases.

The only way to use Unison right now from Mac OS X with a ReadyNAS is to set Unison to ignore permissions, and to run it locally with the ReadyNAS mounted as a network disk. Of course, if permissions matter to you, this could be an issue.

Running it in local mode doesn't give you the performance benefit of the rsync/unison protocols though; it basically misses the whole point. Sure, for many of us, network bandwidth between our computers and the ReadyNAS isn't at a premium (so conserving that doesn't matter), but I'll bet that the ReadyNAS can checksum files locally faster than it can stream them over any of its file sharing protocols.

So back to getting Unison running on the ReadyNAS: very cool that Raidiator 4 is now (beta) available and allows us to run our own services. Anyone have info on toolchain/compilers for compiling Unison (or whatever) for the ReadyNAS?