Roaming User Support - Questions...

[Brad Hards]

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On Wed, 4 Feb 2004 04:31 am, Dr. Juergen Pfennig wrote:
> Is there any white-paper on Roaming User Support? If so please tell me. I
> have a number of problems/questions ... For the following text I assume a
> common scenario where some company using KDE would like that all of their
> users keep the "Documents" folder and the "~/.kde" folder on a central
> server.
These are actually different problems. Shared documents, and a central (user 
specific) source of application configuration data.

> PLEASE DON'T TELL ME THAT THE SERVER SHOULD NEVER BE DOWN! That's not
> realistic for small and medium sized shops.

Please don't shout.

I cannot assess how realistic your assertion. But if you assume this, and you 
don't accept hangs / data unavailability, you need to have local caching.

> - what if the server is unreachable at login (windows uses locally cached
> copies)
Copies of what? Presumably you mean application configuration data.

> - how do locally cached copies get removed if someone only occasionally
> works on a machine (OK, KDE would store it in /tmp, but see below)
On Linux, cron is always the answer. Just phrase the right question :-)

> - what if the screen resolutions differ?
KDE should already handle this. Got a bug report?

> - what if software versions differ?
This probably depends on what software you are talking about.

> - what if some software is not installed on some machine?
Presumably you install it, or live without it.

> If the "Documents" folder is remote but not available some read-only dummy
> folder could be created - just containing a document describing the
> problem.
Some kind of file system synchronisation is surely required. Maybe on a laptop 
you can cache recently used files locally? A KDE front end to a 
synchronisation tool might be an option, but surely KDE can't do this without 
some lower level support.

> As you can see some of the smart features of KDE (writing only differences
> to user config files) and not using a configuration cache (Registry)
> introduce their own problems. Any ideas?
Probably the best answer to this is ACAP. Start with 
http://asg.web.cmu.edu/acap/white-papers/acap-vs-others.html

There is some code in kdenonbeta/acap, but it hasn't been worked in a long 
time, and making it work with KConfig might be a lot of work.  There is at 
least one ACAP server that is beginning to mature.

Does this help.

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