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arod
Asked: 2010-06-28 18:16:17 +0800 CST

is there some sort of catchable trigger when one writes/deletes a new file in linux?

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I would like a simple tool for syncing two folders on remote servers...

Utopically, I only need an OS catchable trigger (or something like that) that could be used to fire rsync automatically ?

Is there anything of the sort, or a simple tool capable of doing this ?

rsync each minute is not at all an elegant solution to the problem ... i would like to call rsync each time a file is written/deleted in any one of the servers, in a specific folder...

the goal is to easily maintain to remote folders in sync

update: maybe something like gamin... ?

thanks !

arod

synchronization linux rsync write

4 Answers

  1. In my answer to this question, I suggested incron. It's easy to set up system-wide and user-specific config files in a manner similar to cron. You can specify scripts that will be run when filesystem events are triggered. It uses the Linux kernel inotify API. You might take a look at it and see if it works for you.

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  2. Try inotify. For your relative simple requirements this should be best suited.

    An example script:

    while { inotifywait -e create -e delete /directory2watch; }; do
  echo rsync -avz /directory2watch
done

    Or something like that.

    With inotify you have access to those events:

    • access – file was accessed
    • modify – file was modified
    • attrib – file attributes changed
    • close_write – file closed, after being opened in writeable mode
    • close_nowrite – file closed, after being opened in read-only mode
    • close – file closed, regardless of read/write mode
    • open – file was opened
    • move – a file within watched directory was moved
    • create – a file was created within watched directory
    • delete – a file was deleted within watched directory
    • delete_self – the watched file was deleted
    • unmount – file system on which watched file exists was unmounted
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  3. It seems like DRBD will do just what you need. It works at the block device level, so if you don't want to maintain a separate partition for this synchronized data, you can just create a disk image and mount it loopback, using DRBD to keep things in sync with the remote server.

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  4. The obvious solution here is afs

    There all sorts of complications using DRBD on anything but a small LAN with high levels of connectivity between nodes.

    But you could roll your own solution using inotify

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