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View Full Version : Running Unison on WL-500gx



rfoss
29-08-2005, 14:43
Hi all,
first of all thanks for creating much improved firmware, Oleg (the beauty of open source!) and second of all thanks for this forum.

When I heard about the WL-500GX I immediately fantasized about connecting a large 300GB drive and use it to serve home directories for my computers. Of course once I learned about the slow speed, I got less sure whether it is realistic.

SUGGESTION
One way to use it might be to implement the Unison File Synchronizer (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/). This is an amazing, cross-platform file synchronizer tool that uses advanced delta synchronization techniques similar to Rsync. Only the difference is it multimaster, and an optional GUI makes this much more user-friendly.

Typically you run Unison on your desktop. A profile specifies that your desktop home directory is to be synchronized with a remote host.
Unison communicates with the remote host over SSH, firing up the server-side of Unison on the host (in user mode). The Unison client and server pieces than agree on which files to synchronize.

Unison does delta sync; ie when a large file changes only the changed parts are synchronized. This means you can easily have many gigabytes of data synchronized on two computers; it only takes seconds to update the two.

In other words Unison could help alleviate the WL-500Gx's speed problems.
You could run Unison with GUI client on your Windows or Linux laptop and synchronize with the (Unison daemon on) WL-500Gx. Meanwhile, you can still access the drive via Samba.


WHATS REQUIRED
Unison needs to be compiled for the WL-500GX. Unfortunately I am not technical enough to do that. I was hoping someone else might take a look to see at least whether it is feasible.

Take a look at Unison. It is very advanced when it comes to file sync - almost no other file sync product for Windows can do delta - although the GUI leaves something to be wanted.

For WL-500GX, only the CLI / daemon part would have to be ported.