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  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 13:11:26 +1030

the Internet is the disk drive

For a while now, I've been trying to work out what
the ".NET" thing is about.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but maybe this is just
"the Internet is the disk drive" - to paraphrase
SUN's motto.

It seems to me that what the opposition is up to is
getting some sort of NFS and NIS going on an Internet
scale.

If that's what it is, then I think that maybe I need
something similar for my linux environments.
Suppose I have a home computer system, an office
computer network, and a laptop.
At present, if I want to modify a document or software
on my laptop, I need to download it from home, modify it,
and remember to copy it back before I get home and
modify the home copy.

So there's some sort of distributed file system problem here,
with possibly very low bandwidths available for
doing the sync.

Question:
Is there anything that does this sort of thing for linux?

Could such a thing be cobbled together from mirroring software,
and NFS etc. etc.?

What I'd like is:

I start to work on a document on my laptop in a hotel.
The computer says "hold on - first check if the
other nodes have changed anything".
I connect to the net.
The "Internet disk drive" layer does a sync of that file.
I modify that file, and say "commit that".
The "Internet disk drive" layer does another sync.

In this way, I don't have to remember to load up software
and documents on my laptop each time before travelling.
And I don't have to remember to copy back the changes.

If this can't be done at the moment, it would be a good
idea, maybe, for a project.
Someone could even make some money out of it!

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
    name: Dr. Alan Kennington
  e-mail: akenning@dog.topology.org
 website: http://topology.org/
    city: Adelaide, South Australia
  coords: 34.88051 S, 138.59334 E
timezone: UTC+1030 http://topology.org/timezone.html
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