License on rsync ??

Jim Salter jim at jrssystems.net
Sat Dec 27 13:31:00 EST 2003


  > 	Reading through a couple different places on the internet, of people
> wondering why there are few to no GUI front-ends (are there any good 
> ones? if so, much of my questions here can be disregarded).

Snippety-snippety-snippety-snip snip.

As JW mentioned, GUI front-ends are normally more popular for Win32 than 
for *nix, and rsync (actually more likely cygwin.dll, but it expresses 
itself as an rsync problem) has some pretty serious flakiness issues 
under Win32.

If you really want to develop an rsync or rsync-ish solution for 
customers (I have been doing the same thing for a while now for my own 
customers) you have several workable options:

1. get them to use Samba servers to store their files, and use rsync 
natively.  simple methods of automation and click-the-link-ishness 
abound; that's what shell scripts are *for*.

2. get them to use an NFS daemon on their Win32 fileserver(s).  there 
are both commercial and free ones available.  the only real issue I know 
of with this approach is that to date, I have not found a Win32 NFS 
server that can handle large (over 4GB) files - but I haven't tried many 
of the commercial ones.

3. use Unison instead of Rsync.  I'm personally not that fond of its 
interface because it's *too* helpfully Windows-ish, but that might work 
well for you.  it has a native win32 port and a native GUI.  it also 
does not have any issues that I have discovered with cygwin's SSH, 
although even if it did you could simply use a different SSH transport - 
rsync's cygwin problem is *not* SSH-related.

Good luck.

Jim Salter



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