-- Moved by moderator to Emcomm Applications - General forum --
Has anyone looked into a shared file system I(AKA cloud storage)? There seem to be a variety of open-source projects, mostly falling into two major groupos: host-centric (I.e. a central server) and distributed (no central server).
My immediate interest is in a distributed system to be used as part of an emergency services network. This would allow files to be maintained on each node and be accessible in event of a network failure. One package, SyncThing (www.syncthing.net) looks pretty good, except it uses encryption (TLS) in the sharing protocol. Though, it seems it would be possible to use null encryption.
In a similar vein, has anyone found some good messaging, status management or incident reporting tools that support a distributed data store? Because these systems typically have complex databases, ikt is not usually possible to use shared disk space (cloud storage) because of the difficulties of reconcilling updates after network communications is restored.
If there is sufficient interest, perhaps we could ask for a forum area dedicated to distributed processing on mesh networks.
I'm evaluating an open source tool called HFS or HTTP File System. It's not a distributed/synced file system, but it is a shared master document system.
What it does:
1) Easy to use basic capabilities: User and Group permissions to upload/download access to files and folders.
2) It is not network intensive. Users only upload/download what and when they need it. Will work (well don't try giga-byte files) on marginal links.
3) Easy to admin. put program in a directory and run it. Windows, linux, etc.
Negatives:
1) It is not distributed, although multiple sites may have their own instance with folders for inbox and workflow
2) Data is not instantly available to all sites.
I've setup OwnCloud for our ARES group. It works well. It supposedly has a federated server model, however, I haven't implemented it yet.