thoughts?

[Todd T. Fries]

I have a couple of machine that almost could use arla but not quite.  I
have been told this is a place to seek brainstorm activity, to boldly
create new ideas never thought of before, or seek out ones I have not
known, etc...

So.. the situation as best I can describe it...

I have a network of machines at my apartment, different archs, a few large
disks.  I have OpenBSD on all machines (but two hppa machines, nfsroot works,
so soon they will be OpenBSD as well) .. I mention the os because it has
arla integrated and thus is available as a client .. several nfs fileservers, 
two machines 'borg' and 'wearable'.  'Borg' is a black thinkpad, and wearable
explains itself.  Although the wearable needs some more hardware before
it is truly portable, it will be soon enough.

I have lots of data I find myself manually duplicating across borg, wearable,
and 'the rest of the net'.  As logistics would have it, borg and wearable will
naturally be separated from the home net and each other for periods of time.

What I think I need is a cachefs of sorts, one that allows me to place in
some sort of persistent writable cache in disconnect mode any files I will
be dealing with while away (for borg, mp3's and src, car casette adaptors
and laptops with audio work nicely!) .. 

My thoughts on an appropriate solution:

- arla server. 
  a) I hear this is in the pipeline, but I would not yet want
     to plan on converting my nfs servers to arla servers.
  b) I hear there exists a 'server' that serves local filesystems instead of
     arla volumes.  Seems perfect for a temporary solution.
- cachefs like filesystem that adds the behaviors:
  - persistent cache across disconnection 
  - persistent cache across reboot
  - disconnected writing to the cache
- arla-drinkers@ original/already thought of idea??

Thoughts?

I'm not on this mailing list, please cc: appropriately.
-- 
Todd Fries .. toddf at acm.org