Tim Watts wrote:

I have raised this before... And tried some stuff. And I cannot believe
there is no solution... hence the first part of the subject.


The problem: "How do I make an existing linux file server be a private
cloud file server, targeting other linux, ChromeBooks and Android
clients?"


There is a LOT of stuff that misses out of critical features - or those
features need a paid-for version that costs $1700-9000 per year.

I've played with Tonido and OwnCloud so far.

Obvious omissions in the free versions:

a Limited shares (OwnCloud only seems to support 1 exported directory -
I have lots);

b (Serious) Do not integrate with POSIX users. The idea is the file
sharing should integrate with linux, not try and take over.


I did look at OpenAFS but there's no Android client.


SFTP so far offers the simplest solution but I can find no nice clients
that offer local copies (caching) so it is still somewhat half arsed.
And i suspect the basic nature of the protocol is it would be hard work
to make caching multiple client copies work.

Run rsync in a cron job?


OK - allowing for the fact that "I could write it myself dammit"
(actually, no, I don't have that type of coding skill) I'm very
surprised such a killer app is missing from the opensource stable.

Use puppet - it does all that and more.

I copped out and did my own using gambas.
It took me about 3 days to write scripts that do
do file copying automatically across continents with ssh,
email log files with sendemail, etc etc etc.



This is the same opensource that brought us *BSD, Linux, perl, python, 2
super RDBMSs, top rate image editing, rock solid *connected*
fileservices (NFS, SMB) allowing for the fact the latter had to be
reverse engineered.

Have all the creative types died?

Nothing ever dies in open source, and if it does, there is usually
a patch for it available in 24 hours.
What is happening is that all commonly requested wants have been satisfied
and thus topics go quiet. So you need to get out and ask.