[linux-cifs-client] Re: Offline Files

[Steve French]

On Tuesday 25 July 2006 16:40, Calvin Spealman wrote:

>I have been searching and asking everywhere, and can find no
>information about this. I want to use something like the windows
>Offline Files feature, but from my linux clients. I need to specify
>specific files or directory trees, and make them cached locally for
>use when the server is unavailable, and for changes to be synced when
>I reconnect to the server. I have some ideas for faking this, if I
>have to, but want to avoid that. Any ideas?
>
At OLS last week, David Howells and I started prototyping CacheFS 
enablement for CIFS.
For a description of CacheFS ("FS-Cache") see page 427ff of:
    http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2006/linuxsymposium_procv1.pdf
There are patches for the same kind of thing for NFS but I think it 
would probably be easier with
CIFS due to some of the things added for offline files (needs more 
investigation what this would
looks like on the wire though).   I will put the cifs patche for 
fs-cache up on the project download
site later in the week - but it is not far enough along to be 
interesting to a user (yet).

James Roper wrote:
> This isn't quite what you want, but it's a start:
>
> http://lists.samba.org/archive/linux/2004-March/010211.html
>
> I haven't tried it for myself, from the description, I can't work out whether 
> changes at the server end get seen by the client, but I'd hope it would do 
> that.  I wouldn't imagine that it would be too hard to make it work off the 
> cached version of the filesystem when offline, the main thing you'd have to 
> do is implement a way for it to sync changes back to the target filesystem.

> I'm surprised someone hasn't already written a fuse filesystem that provides 
> the functionality MS does with its offline files.