[Tfug] Synchronizing directories.

[John Hubbard]

I have a htpc that lives in my living room, a desktop machine that lives 
in my office and a wireless network that connects the two.  Both 
machines have NFS running and that is how I access files.  My wireless 
network isn't quite fast enough.  When I try to open a 5MB image file 
located on the remote machine, it takes a little longer than I would 
like.  (I have tested bandwidth and iperf claims that I am seeing 
~8Mbits/sec between the two machines).  Keeping a copy of every file on 
each machine solves my current problem of a slow network connection as 
well as my lack of backup.  Is this the best solution or is there some 
special filesystem that would solve my problem?  If copies of the files 
is my best bet how should I implement it?  I am not sure if rsync will 
work to solve my problem because I can't guarantee which machine I will 
delete the files from.

So does anyone know of a solution to my problem, or do I need to write a 
custom script to crawl the relevant directories on both machines and 
inspect timestamps to determine if a file has been added or deleted and 
then make the appropriate change on the other machine?  Has anyone 
already written this script?  Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

It shouldn't matter much but this is being done on various versions of 
Ubuntu.  In the near future I will likely be upgrading to the 10.04 but 
at the moment one machines is 9.10 and the other is 8.04.

Thanks
-john