Mirroring samba file server.

[dweimer]

On 2015-12-18 12:32 pm, Jeremy Gransden wrote:
> I have a network with 8 remote sites. 7 of the 8 can use the main
> samba file server without much issue with latency. I have one location
> where the latency is really high. I was thinking of adding a 2nd samba
> server in that location and mirroring the 1st one. Has anyone done a
> setup similar to this? What should I use to sync the 2 servers? Both
> servers will be running FreeBSD 10.2 on ZFS. Would zfs send/receive
> work on live data or would rsync be better?
> 
> 
> thanks for your help,
> j

You need to describe more about what you are trying to do, I don't 
believe neither ZFS send/receive or rsync will work if you want to be 
able to edit data on both and keep them in sync. However if the remote 
server is going to serve read only reference data for the site, and 
changes are only made to the parent they will work. However ZFS may 
require the receiving dataset to be dismounted in order to receive the 
changes, but I could be wrong.

You may also want to look at /usr/ports/net/unison:

cat /usr/ports/net/unison/pkg-descr
Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows 
two
replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on 
different
hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and 
then
brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the 
other.

Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration
management packages (CVS, PRCS, etc.) distributed filesystems (Coda, 
etc.)
uni-directional mirroring utilities (rsync, etc.) and other 
synchronizers
(Intellisync, Reconcile, etc).

-- 
Thanks,
    Dean E. Weimer
    http://www.dweimer.net/