SUMMARY: alternatives to rdist for local distribution

From: David Lawrence Oppenheimer (davido@Princeton.EDU)
Date: Thu Sep 01 1994 - 18:23:17 CDT


I only received one response to my question, which asked about
alternatives to rdist for maintaing identical file/directory
heirarchies among multiple filesystems _on the same host_ (for
example, keeping a set of files on an attached disk drive up to
date with a set of files mounted on that system via NFS).

This person suggested the program 'track'; here is the info:

----------------------------------------------------------------------

>From medwards@astro Thu Sep 1 19:09:33 1994
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 94 13:21:10 EDT
From: <medwards@astro>
To: davido@mindbender
Subject: Re: rdist for local systems?

Try ftp.cs.utoronto.edu. From the README:

> This is "track", a system that tries to maintain software and data on
> multiple machines. Updates are made on a central machine (or machines)
> called the librarians, and made available for export. Receiving
> machines, called subscribers, initiate the transfer of files, by
> asking for the list of changed files and getting the files they
> need/want. Librarians have complete control over the files they want
> to export, the subscribers they want to export to and the times they
> are willing to make changes known, subscribers have complete control
> over the files they want to import, where they want to put those files
> and the times they want to import files. That allows track to be
> used between administratively independent domains, and makes it
> considerably more flexible and efficient than rdist.
>
> This software was originally written at Bell Communications Research
> by Daniel Nachbar. It's been modified a lot at the
> University of Toronto.
>
> We use it heavily on Suns running SunOS4.x and 5.3, Ultrix machines
> (Vaxen and DS3100s) and SGI Iris4Ds running Iris [45].x. In particular,
> it's enabled us to avoid YP, er, Network Information Service.
>
> UofT changes that I know of:
>
> - Inline find instead of invoking /bin/find for every line in a
> subscription list.
>
> - Made it work with all fields on the track line.
>
> - Fixed a few bugs, including a couple of nasty security holes.
>
> - Made trackd lint. John Linderman at AT&T provided some lint modes
> and general fixes for calltrack, and trackd.
>
> - Some performance improvements, and porting to different platforms.
>
> - SunOS5 port by Edwin Allum.
>
> We're not responsible for this. But we'd like to hear of improvements,
> bugs and fixes.
>
> - moraes@cs.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes, University of Toronto)
> - and hacks@cs.toronto.edu

David Oppenheimer
davido@Princeton.EDU



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