[Zope] Will ZEO solve my problem?

[Kyler B. Laird]

On Mon, 2 Jul 2001 15:11:14 -0700 (PDT) you wrote:

>have you looked at Coda or Intermezzo?  Both distributed file systems,
>although I've used niether.

I've looked at these for other purposes.  They're
pretty complex solutions for such a simple
problem.

Because Data.fs is a transaction log, and thus
only grows by having bits added at the end (except
when packed - certainly an exception that must be
handled), it is ripe for this simple "tail -f"
solution.  There is no need to have something
that is good at recognizing changes within a file
or handling all the other filesystem goodies
(like ownership/modes/locks/...).

After talking about it more today, it looks like
we will probably even stream the updates to at
least two machines.  One will be off-site in case
things *really* go bad.  It will not be used as a
ZEO server, but will only serve to hold the data
in case the other two go bad.  (This is
especially important when the primary has already
gone down.)  I might even encrypt the outgoing
stream and store it at another location that I do
not administer.

Hmmmm...it shouldn't take much hacking to be able
to specify one "file" as input to Zope and one as
output.  That would mean that I could, for
example, write each day's transactions to a
separate file, concatenating all of them any time
I start Zope.  This would allow me to easily back
the database out a day (as I did recently) or
stream only updates to another server.  (I could
even compress the input files.)

--kyler