Wednesday, March 11, 2009
I like buying technical books.
Unfortunately, here in Hong Kong, we have less choice: there are not that many technical bookstores that cater for English-language books and the selection is rather limited.
So whenever a book isn’t available here, I buy it online as a PDF.
It’s cheaper, saves postage and I can keep them handy on my desktop computer at work and my laptop.
I love Safari and being able to access such a large library of books online in such a flexible way is great, but if you’re not in the US, the experience is not always that pleasant, with the site sometimes becoming a bit too slow for comfort.
The publishers I regularly buy ebooks from are O’Reilly, when they make the PDF available, and Apress.
O’Reilly’s PDF may have your subscribtion details embedded at the bottom of each page.
It’s perfectly reasonable and doesn’t ruin the experience: I can still search, copy snippets to the clipboard and print the book if I need to keep an annotated copy.
Apress encrypt the PDF with your account email. Again, that’s fine by me, they don’t prevent me from using the book and it’s not a great annoyance to have to type the password to unlock the book.
Now comes Wrox (Wiley): they publish fine books and even have some available as ebooks.
The biggest issue I have though is that they assume that people who buy their books are all potential criminals:
- The book is as expensive in paper as it is in ebook format. That can’t be right: ebooks have zero reproduction cost while paper books have huge material costs.
- The ebook version needs to be registered with Adobe Digital Editions that locks it to a particular machine.
- You’re only allowed to download the ebook to 4 different PCs and you’ve got 2 weeks to do so.
This seems fair, but it’s not: if I change OS or PC, I’ve already burnt 2 licenses. - You can’t copy/paste more than a page at a time, up to 10 pages every week… that’s just a bit silly.
- Can’t copy any of the artwork, diagrams, etc.
- Doesn’t say anything about what happens if Adobe drops their particular DRM software or if I need to use the book on the next laptop I’ll buy a year from now.
- Adobe Digital Edition only supports Windows and Mac and a Sony reader. So using Linux (even though Wrox plublishes books about it) or a Kindle or any other mobile device is out of the question.
So the net advantage of buying an eBook from Wrox (Wiley) is: your guess is as good as mine.
Yeah, you can buy each chapter as a PDF: great value, at US$4.99 per chapter, the book is costing you nearly US$100. You can get the fully printed version for half the cost…
Still, I’ll concede that being able to download a particular chapter can be useful.
The bottom line is: if your book gets printed, it’s going to be pirated and distributed for free in ebook format within a couple of weeks of being published.
While thinking they are protecting their copyright, Wiley is in fact punishing people who buy their books.
I’ll stick with Apress and O’Reilly I think. At least I don’t feel treated like a thief.
12FEB2010 Update: Wrox is now trying DRM-free PDF ebooks. We can only applaud this decision. While the offering is still limited at the moment, most or all of their books will eventually be available DRM-free.
Bookshelf by Charles Kalpakian
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Filed under : Books,Business,Reviews
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
After suffering broadband trouble for the past 9 months, including interruptions that lasted a few days, I decided to get an additional line installed by a different ISP.
I could have bought one of these multi-WAN devices but decided against it for a couple of reasons: I like a challenge and I wanted to achieve a particular setup that I wasn’t sure could be answered by off-the-shelf products (for a reasonable price that is).
This long article is fairly detailed but if your setup is similar it should be enough to get you going quickly.
The basic setup
Without further ado, this is the network configuration:
Notable things
We have 2 broadband connections:
- CYBR, a standard DSL line with a fixed IP
111.99.88.77 allocated through PPPoE. - HKBN, a standard 100Mbps line with a fixed IP
30.40.50.62.
The network is split into different zones:
- the Internet zone, connected to our Firewall through interfaces
eth0 (ppp0) and eth1. - a Firewall zone, delimited by the firewall system itself
- a DMZ zone connected through interface
eth2 for the servers we want to make visible from the Internet.
The DMZ has its own private subnet delimited by 192.168.254.0/255.255.255.0. - a LAN zone connected through interface
eth3 so local computers can access the Internet and be protected from it.
The DMZ has its own private subnet delimited by 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0.
Objectives
What we want from our setup:
- our firewall protects our DMZ and LAN from unwanted access.
- our win server can host websites or other services.
- our linux server can handle receiving and sending email or other services.
- our firewall can handle incoming traffic from either ISP.
- our firewall can load-balance local outgoing traffic across both ISP.
- If one line fails, incoming traffic switches to the other line.
- If one line fails, outgoing traffic switches to the other line.
- Eventually, we want both the linux and win servers to be able to host different websites and we want the firewall to send incoming requests to the right server.
In this first article, I’ll present the setup for items 1-5.
The remaining topics will be the subject of subsequent articles of their own.
Technologies
The firewall is our primary subject. What is being discussed here is pretty much distribution-independent and should work on all flavours of Linux.
OS on the firewall system
I chose CentOS on the firewall.
Being an almost byte-for-byte identical copy of RedHat Enterprise Linux, all configuration will be identical on RedHat and its derivatives such as Fedora.
Firewall software, first try
When my firewall needs are simpler, I use the Stronger IP Firewall Ruleset from the Linux IP Masquerade HOWTO.
I started to modify the script to adapt it to my new Multi-ISP setup but things got complicated once I needed to debug routing tables.
I got it 80% of the way but tracing network connections and packet routing is complicated and time-consuming.
After a couple of days of peering into log files and wireshark capture screens, I gave up manual configuration and decided to go with something else.
Firewall software, final
The product I chose in the end is shorewall: it’s a very flexible firewall system that create the necessary iptable rules and configure most of the routing needs to properly handle complex network setup.
Shorewall is Open Source, very stable, has been out for a long time, is actively maintained and has lots of excellent documentation and examples.
Things to know
Before we get into the meat of the article, you should brush up on the following topics:
- You have some knowledge of Linux system administration, know how to configure network connections, know how to enable/disable/stop/start services, able to edit config files.
- Networking: you should know what a netmask is, what a gateway is, what a subnet is and have a passing understanding of IP classes, IP notation, what ports are for, what’s the difference between the tcp, udp, icmp protocols, what Dynamic Port Forwarding (DNAT) is, what Network Address Translation (NAT) is, what masquerading means.
- Some basic understanding of DNS and local host name resolving (using
host.conf and resolv.conf) - Some basic knowledge of what routing is for and how it works.
- Some knowledge of how the linux kernel handles network packets (NetFilter, basics of iptables).
You don’t need to be a specialist in any of these areas but any knowledge helps.
I’m far from being well versed into Netfilter and routing, it’s not often that I have to deal directly with these topics, but brushing up on these topics helped.
Things to read
Shorewall has very extensive documentation. So much so that it can be a bit daunting, not knowing where to start.
I found the following documents helpful to get me started:
Installing shorewall
Go to the download site list [http://shorewall.net/download.htm#Sites] and download the most appropriate binary package for your distribution.
If you get RPMs for RedHat systems, you only need to install (rpm -ivh) the following packages:
shorewall-4.X.X-X.noarch.rpm
shorewall-perl-4.X.X-X.noarch.rpm
If you install from source, only download, compile and install the common, doc and perl packages.
Preparing the system
For shorewall to properly handle both our firewall and packet routing needs, we need to make sure that the other parts of the system are not interfering with it.
Internet lines
Make sure that your multiple internet lines are properly working on their own!
Disable routing
- Make sure that you don’t define a
GATEWAY in the configuration of your network interfaces (in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-XXX) . - If you use an (A)DSL connection, also set
DEFROUTE=no if its ifcfg-XXX file as well. - Remove the
GATEWAY from the /etc/sysconfig/network file if there is one. - Edit your
/etc/sysctl.conf file and set net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 0.
Disable firewall
Disable the current firewall, for instance using the system-config-securitylevel helper tool.
Be careful if you’re directly connected to the Internet, you will be left without protection!
You can actually wait until shorewall is properly configured to disable the firewall.
Shorewall configuration
Shorewall uses a set of simple configuration files, all located under /etc/shorewall/.
For exact detail of each configuration files, have a look at the list of man pages.
Zones
zones are probably the simplest configuration file.
Details in the zones man page.
Here we just name the various zones we want our firewall to handle:
################################################################
#ZONE TYPE OPTIONS IN OUT
# OPTIONS OPTIONS
fw firewall
net ipv4
loc ipv4
dmz ipv4
This just reflects our setup as highlighted in the diagram above.
Note that the fw zone is often referred to as the $FW variable instead in various configuration files.
Interfaces
Here we list all the network interfaces connected to our firewall and for which zone they apply.
Details in the interfaces man page.
################################################################
#ZONE INTERFACE BROADCAST OPTIONS
net ppp0 detect
net eth1 detect
dmz eth2 detect
loc eth3 detect
Note that for our net zone, we list the 2 interfaces connected to our ISPs.
If you’re using PPPoE to connect, don;t use the interface name eth0 but use ppp0 instead.
Policy
The policy file tells shorewall which default actions should be taken when traffic is moving from one zone to another.
These default actions are taken if no other special action was specified in other configuration files.
View the policy file as a list of default actions for the firewall.
Details about this configuration file as in its man page.
################################################################
#SOURCE DEST POLICY LOG LIMIT: CONNLIMIT:
# LEVEL BURST MASK
net net DROP info
loc net ACCEPT
dmz net ACCEPT
loc dmz ACCEPT
loc $FW ACCEPT
dmz $FW ACCEPT
$FW net ACCEPT
dmz loc DROP info
net all DROP info
all all DROP info
Traffic from one zone to another needs to be explicitely ACCEPTed, REJECTed or DROPped.
For instance, loc net ACCEPT means that we allow all traffic from our local LAN to the Internet, while net all DROP means we don’t allow incoming traffic from the internet to anyone (remember this is the default action, in most cases we will override this for specific types of traffic in the rules file).
When we set the default action to DROP, we can tell shorewall to keep a trace of the details in the /var/log/messages log.
Providers
The providers file is generally only used in a multi-ISP environment.
Here we define how we want to mark packets originating from one ISP with a unique ID so we can tell the kernel to route these packets to the right interface.
Not doing this would get packets received from one interface to be routed to the default gateway instead.
The details of this configuration file are explained in the providers man page for it.
#############################################################################
#NAME NUMBER MARK DUPLICATE INTERFACE GATEWAY OPTIONS COPY
CYBR 1 0x1 main ppp0 - track,balance=1 eth2,eth3
HKBN 2 0x2 main eth1 30.40.50.61 track,balance=5 eth2,eth3
Note that the DUPLICATE columns tells shorewall that it should make a copy of the main default routing table for this particular routing table (called CYBR or HKBN depending on which ISP we refer to).
Packets are marked with number 0×1 or 0×2 so we can distinguish them during their travel through the system.
For PPPoE connections, don’t specify a GATEWAY since it’s most likely that your ISP didn’t give you one.
The most interesting part of this file are the OPTIONS: track means that we want the packets to be tracked as they travel through the system; balance tells the kernel that we want traffic coming out to be spread over both interfaces.
Additionally, we want HKBN to receive more or less 5 times more traffic than CYBR (note that this has no effect on reply packets).
The COPY columns will ensure that the routing tables created for CYBR and HKBN are copied for each internal interface, so our eth2 and eth3 interfaces know how to route packets to the right ISP.
Route Rules
For our purpsose, the route_rules file only describes how traffic should be routed through one or the other ISP we set up in /etc/shorewall/providers.
Details are in the route_rules file man page.
#####################################################################
#SOURCE DEST PROVIDER PRIORITY
ppp0 - CYBR 1000
eth1 - HKBN 1000
Here we simply say that all traffic through the CYBR table should be sent to ppp0.
The PRIORITY is an ordering number that tell shorewall to consider this routing rule before it marks the packets. Since we know the packets originated from ppp0 or eth1 we don’t really need to mark them.
Masq
The masq file will contain the masquerading rules for our private interfaces: in essence, we want traffic from the local LAN and DMZ to be hidden behind our limited number of external IPs.
See the masq manpage for all the details.
#####################################################################
#INTERFACE SOURCE ADDRESS
# Ensure that traffic originating on the firewall and redirected via
# packet marks always has the source IP address corresponding to the
# interface that it is routed out of.
# See http://shorewall.net/MultiISP.html#Example1
ppp0 30.40.50.62 111.99.88.77
eth1 111.99.88.77 30.40.50.62
ppp0 eth2 111.99.88.77
eth1 eth2 30.40.50.62
ppp0 eth3 111.99.88.77
eth1 eth3 30.40.50.62
The first part ensures that the traffic coming out of our public interfaces but originating from the other is actually rewritten as originating from the right IP for the interface.
This ensures that packets leaving eth1 for instance don’t come out with the wrong source address of the other interface.
The second part of the ensures that packets from our LAN or DMZ leaving either public interfaces are doing so with the right IP address, so traffic from my desktop going through ppp0 for instance, will have its source address as 100.90.80.70.
Rules
This is the main file where we tell shorewall our basic configuration and how we want packets to be handled in the general case.
The /etc/shorewall/rules file contains the specific instructions on where to direct traffic that will override the default actions defined in the /etc/shorewall/policy file.
#####################################################################
#ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO
#
SECTION NEW
# Drop and log packets that come from the outside but pretend
# to have a local address
DROP:info net:192.168.0.0/24 all
DROP:info net:192.168.254.0/24 all
# Redirect incoming traffic to the correct server for WWW and email
DNAT all dmz:192.168.254.20 tcp www
DNAT all dmz:192.168.254.10 tcp 110
DNAT all dmz:192.168.254.10 tcp 143
DNAT all dmz:192.168.254.10 tcp 25
In its most basic form, what we’ve just defined here is that we want all traffic from anywhere destined for port 80 (www) to be sent to our win server.
All mail traffic, POP3 (port 110), IMAP (port 143) and SMTP (port 25) is to be redirected to our linux server in the DMZ.
There are a few more useful rules that we can include, for instance, I want to be able to access my servers through either ISPs from home (IP 123.45.67.89) and disallow everyone else from accessing it.
#####################################################################
#ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO
#
# Allow SSH to the firewall from the outside only from home
ACCEPT net:123.45.67.89 $FW tcp ssh
# Redirect input traffic to the correct server for RDP, VNC and SSH
DNAT net:123.45.67.89 dmz:192.168.254.10:22 tcp 2222
DNAT net:123.45.67.89 dmz:192.168.254.10 tcp 5901
DNAT net:123.45.67.89 dmz:192.168.254.20 tcp 3389
When I SSH to 30.40.50.62 or 100.90.80.70, on the normal port 22, I will access the firewall.
Now if I SSH to the non-standard port 2222, I will instead access the linux server.
Ports 5901 are for remoting through VNC on the linux machine, and port 3389 will be used for Remote Desktop connections to the win server.
To make sure my machines are up and running, I like to be able to ping them:
#####################################################################
#ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO
#
# Accept pings between zones
ACCEPT dmz loc icmp echo-request
ACCEPT loc dmz icmp echo-request
Note that ping will only work between the LAN and the DMZ and pinging my firewall from the Internet will result in the requests being silently dropped.
I usually prefer that configuration as it makes discovering the servers by random bots slightly less likely.
There are lots of other cool things we can do with forwarding but that will do for now.
shorewall.conf
The last file we’re going to look at is the main configuration file for shorewall.
See details about each option from the man page for shorewall.conf.
Most options are OK by default. The only ones that I have had to change are:
STARTUP_ENABLED=Yes
MARK_IN_FORWARD_CHAIN=Yes
FASTACCEPT=Yes
OPTIMIZE=1
The first option tells shorewall that we want it to start automatically when the system boots.
That’s not enough though, so make sure that the service will be started:
# chkconfig shorewall --levels 235 on
Installing our firewall rules
Shorewall configuration files need to be compiled without error before the firewall is actually loaded by shorewall.
The command:
# shorewall restart
will stop and recompile the current configuration.
If there are any errors, the current firewall rules will be unchanged.
There are lots of other commands that can be issued. Check the man page for a complete list.
If you use PPPoE, you will want the firewall to be restarted every time the line reconnects.
The simplest way is to create a file /etc/ppp/if-up.local with only a single line:
shorewall restart
DNS
There is one remaining issue with our firewall: if a user on the LAN attempts to access the web server by its name the request will probably fail.
Same for accessing our mail server: we can configure our desktop to connect to 192.168.254.10 to get and send emails, but on the laptop we would usually use something like pop.acme.com instead so we can read our emails from outside the office.
Similarly, trying to access www.acme.com hosted on the win server from the linux server will fail.
One solution is to route traffic through the firewall but that’s actually fairly complicated to setup properly.
The shorewall FAQ 2 discourages this and instead recommends the use of split-DNS: it’s very easy to setup and it works like a charm.
dnsmasq
Just install dnsmasq on the firewall. There are ready-made packages available for it and a simple yum install dsnmasq should suffice.
Dnsmasq provides a simple DNS forwarding and DHCP service. I had already configured dhcpd -which is already fairly simple to configure- on my firewall so I won’t need DHCP from dnsmasq but you can easily set it up if you want.
On the DNS side, dnsmasq can be told to first try to resolve hostnames by looking at the standard /etc/hosts file and then query the DNS servers defined in /etc/resolv.conf if necessary.
This simple trick means that we can:
- Keep our normal DNS service pointing to say
100.90.80.70 for www.acme.com so that people on the Internet will properly resolve their web requests to our win server. - Add an entry in the firewall’s
hosts file to point local clients to 192.168.254.20 instead.
To achieve this, simply edit /etc/hostsand add entries matching all your services:
# Acme's services.
# One line for each DNS entries accessible from the Internet
192.168.254.20 acme.com
192.168.254.20 www.acme.com
192.168.254.10 pop.acme.com
192.168.254.10 mail.acme.com
dsnmasq configuration
Edit the /etc/dsnmasq.conf and uncomment or add the following lines:
# Never forward plain names (without a dot or domain part)
domain-needed
# Never forward addresses in the non-routed address spaces.
bogus-priv
# listen on DMZ and LAN interfaces
interface=eth2
interface=eth3
# don't want dnsmasq to provide dhcp
no-dhcp-interface=eth2
no-dhcp-interface=eth3
Then make sure that dsnmasq will start on boot:
# chkconfig dnsmasq --levels 235 on
# service dnsmasq restart
DNS resolution
There may be one last issue with DNS: in your /etc/resolv.conf you will have listed the DNS servers of one or both of your ISPs.
The problem is that some ISPs don’t allow access to their name servers from a network different than theirs.
The result is that each time any of the systems issues a DNS request it may fail and need to be sent to the next server instead, which may also fail and introduce delays in accessing named resources on the Internet.
One easy way out is to not use the ISPs DNS servers but instead only list the free OpenDNS name servers in your resolv.conf:
search acme.com
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
Then make sure that you disable DNS in your /etc/sysconfig/network-config/ifcfg-XXX configuration file for your PPPoE connection:
PEERDNS=no
Failure to do so will result in your /etc/resolv.conf file being rewritten with the DNS servers of one of your ISP every time you reconnect to them.
DHCP configuration
If you use dhcpd for local users, then you will need to make sure that its DNS server is set to the firewall’s:
# DHCP Server Configuration file.
ddns-update-style none;
ignore client-updates;
subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
option routers 192.168.0.1;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option domain-name "acme.com";
option domain-name-servers 192.168.0.1;
range 192.168.0.200 192.168.0.250;
default-lease-time 86400;
max-lease-time 132000;
}
On your local machines that use DHCP, make sure to renew your IP.
All other machines should be configured to use 192.168.0.1 as their unique DNS server and the machines in the DMZ should have their DNS set to 192.168.254.1.
Unless you reboot, don’t forget and flush the local DNS cache of each machine:
On Windows, from the command line:
C:\> ipconfig /flushdns
On Mac, from the terminal:
bash-x.xxx$ dnscacheutil -flushcache
Initial conclusions
I believe this type of firewall setup is fairly common and I hope that the -rather long- article helped you get your own setup in place.
In the -much shorter- follow-up articles, we’ll make our system as redundant as possible so our web and email services stay online even when one of the broadband connections fails.
In the meantime, don’t hesitate to leave your comments and corrections below.
History
References
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Filed under : Linux,Security,sysadmin,Web
Monday, January 19, 2009
Over the years I’ve struggled to keep my folder data synchronised between my various desktop and laptops.
Here I present the tools I’ve tried and what I’ve finally settled on as possibly the ultimate answer to the problem of synchronising files and folders across multiple computers:
rsync
I’ve tried rsync, which is a great Open Source tool to securely synchronise data either one-way or both-ways.
It’s very efficient with bandwidth as it only transfer blocks of data that have actually changed in a file instead of the whole file. It can tunnel traffic across SSH and I’ve got a few cronjobs set up between various servers to back-up files daily.
It’s only weaknesses are that:
- Every time it runs, it needs to inspect all files on both sides to determine the
changes, which is quite an expensive operation.
- Setting up synchronisation between multiple copies of the data can be tricky:
you need to sync your computers in pairs multiple times, which quickly becomes
expensive and risky if you have the same copy across multiple computers.
- It doesn’t necessarily detect that files are in use at the time of the sync, which
could corrupt them.
unison
It a folder synchronisation tool whose specific purpose is to address some of the shortcomings of rsync when synchronising folders between computers.
It’s also a cross-platform Open Source tool that works on Linux, OS/X, Windows, etc.
Unison uses the efficient file transfer capabilities of rsync but it is better at detecting conflicts and it will give you a chance to decide which copy you want when a conflict is detected.
The issue though is that, like rsync, it needs to inspect all files to detect changes which prevents it from detecting and propagating updates as they happen.
The biggest issue with these synchronisation tools is that they tend to increase the risk of conflict because changes are only detected infrequently.
WinSCP
WinSCP Is an Open Source Windows GUI FTP utility that also allows you to synchonise folders between a local copy and a remote one on the FTP server.
It has conflict resolution and allows you to decide which copy to keep.
It’s great for what it does and allows you to keep a repository of your data in sync with your local copies but here again, WinSCP needs to go through each file to detect the differences and you need to sync manually each computer against the server, which is cumbersome and time consuming.
General Backup tools
There are lot more tools that fall into that category of backup utilities: they all keep a copy of your current data in an archive, on a separate disk or online.
Some are great in that they allow you to access that data on the web (I use the excellent JungleDisk myself) but file synchronisation is not their purpose.
Now for some Captain Obvious recommendation: remember that file synchronisation is not a backup plan: you must have a separate process to keep read-only copies of your important data.
File synchronisation will update and delete files you modify across all your machines, clearly not what you want if you need to be able to recover them!
Revision Control Systems
Revision control software like cvs, subversion, git, etc are generally used to keep track of changes of source code files; however, they have also been used successfully to keep multiple copies of the same data in sync.
It’s actually exactly what I use for all my source code and associated files: I have a subversion server and I check-out copies of my software project folders on various computers.
After making changes on one computer, I commit the changes back to the server and update these changes on all other computers manually.
While great at keeping track of each version of your files and ideally suited to pure text documents like source code, using revision control systems have drawbacks that make them cumbersome for general data synchronisation:
- you need to manually commit and update your local copies against the server.
- not all of them are well suited to deal with binary files
- when they work with binary files, they just copy the whole file when it changed, which is wasteful and inefficient.
Revision Control System are great for synchronising source code and configuration files but using them beyond that is rather cumbersome.
Complex setup
All of the above solutions also have a major drawback: getting them to work across the Internet requires complex setup involving firewall configurations, security logins, exchange of public encryption keys in some cases, etc.
All these are workable but don’t make for friendly and piece-of-mind setup.
What we want from data synchronisation
I don’t know about you but what I’m looking for in a synchronisation tool is pretty straightforward:
- Being able to point to a folder on one computer and make it synchronise across one or multiple computers.
- Detect and update the changed files transparently in the background without my intervention, as the changes happen.
- Be smart about conflict detection and only ask me to make a decision if the case isn’t obvious to resolve.
Live Mesh folders
Enters Microsoft Live Mesh Folders, now in beta and available to the public.
Live Mesh is meant to be Microsoft answer’s to synchronising information (note, I’m not saying data here) across computers, devices and the Internet.
While Live Mesh wants to be something a lot bigger than just synchronising folders, let’s just concentrate on that aspect of it.
Installing Live Mesh is pretty easy: you will need a Windows Live account to log-in but once this is done, it’s a small download and a short installation.
Once you’ve added your computer to your “Mesh” and are logged in you are ready to use Live Mesh:
- You decide how the data is synchronised for each computer participating in your Mesh:
you’re in charge of what gets copied where, so it’s easy to make large folders pair between say your laptop and work desktop and not your online Live Desktop (which has a 5GB limit) or your computer at home. You’re in control. - Files are automatically synchronised as they change across all computers that share the particular folder you’re working in.
If the file is currently used, it won’t be synced before it is closed. - If the other computers are not available, the sync will automatically happen as they are up again.
- There is no firewall setup: each computer knows how to contact the others and automatically -and uses- the appropriate network: transfers are local if the computers are on the same LAN or done across the Internet otherwise.
All that without user intervention at all. - Whenever possible, data is exchanged in a P2P fashion where each device gets data from all the other devices it can see, making transfers quite efficient.
- File transfers are encrypted so they should be pretty safe even when using unsafe public connections.
- If you don’t want to allow sync, say you’re on a low-bandwidth dialup, you can work offline.
- The Mesh Operating Environment (MOE) is pretty efficient at detecting changes to files. Unlike other systems, in most cases it doesn’t need to scan all files to find out which ones have been updated or deleted.
Some drawbacks
- It’s not a final product, so there are some quirks and not all expected functionalities are there yet.
- The Mesh Operating Environment (MOE) services can be pretty resource hungry, although, in fairness, it’s not too bad except that it slows down your computer’s responsiveness while it loads at boot time.
- You can’t define patterns of files to exclude in your folder hierarchy.
That can be a bit annoying if the software you use is often creating large backup files automatically (like CorelDraw does) or if there are sub folders you don’t need to take everywhere. - The initial sync process can take a long time if you have lots of files.
A solution if you have large folders to sync is to copy them first manually on each computer and then force Live Mesh to use these specific folders: the folders will be merged together and the initial sync process will be a lot faster as very little data needs to be exchanged between computers.
Bear in mind that Live Mesh is currently early beta and that most of these drawback will surely be addressed in the next months.
Conclusion
I currently have more than 18GB representing about 20,000 files synchronised between 3 computers (work desktop, laptop and home desktop) using Live Mesh.
While not 100% there, Live Mesh Folder synchronisation is really close to the real thing: it’s transparent, efficient, easy to use and it just works as you would
expect.
Now that Microsoft has released the Sync Framework to developers, I’m sure that other products will come on the market to further enhance data synchronisation in a more capable way.
In the meantime, Live Mesh has answered my needs so far.
References
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Filed under : Software,sync,sysadmin
I’m currently researching ways to move my main MS Access application from a simple local network client/backend setup to a global, multiple remote sites configuration using SQL Server.
SSMA lets you take a bunch of Access databases and move the tables and queries you choose to SQL Server, automatically linking them in your original database if you want.
I couldn’t find any relevant information on the web.
I made a mistake the other day: I wanted to delete the partition on an external drive and in my haste ended up deleting the partition of a local hard drive instead…
