Tuesday December 22nd, 2009 01:08 am (UTC)
Article in english Linux Magazine
As you probably know we wrote an article about OFS for the german Linux Magazin and the english Linux Pro Magazine one year ago.
Both, the german and the english article are now available online.
English: http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Issues/2009/99/CONNECTIONS/
German: http://www.linux-magazin.de/Heft-Abo/Ausgaben/2009/01/Verbindungssuche
I really recommend reading it if you did not had the possibility to get the magazine.
We wrote about the concepts of OFS and our plans. We went a big step into the right direction, but there is still much work. For example OFS is much more stable today, but we still lack a decent GUI.
Take a look at the articles and share our ideas.
Category Computer, Linux, Non-technical, OFS, Technical 
1 Comment »
Saturday December 12th, 2009 10:32 pm (UTC)
My father recently bought a new TV from sony which, beside other cool features, has support for DLNA.
DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) is a standard for networking entertainment devices such as TVs. One simple use-case is to have a server containing media files such as pictures, videos or movies. On the other hand you have your TV, Playstation or simply DLNA-able PC client as a viewer. The Client enables you to browse your files and demand the server to stream selected files.
Being a tech-interested person I tried to turn my linux server to a DLNA server. I discovered a very powerful daemon called minidlna. This was probably the easiest server I ever set up. Just copied the configuration file template to /etc, adjusted the directories my mediafiles are located and listed the network devices for communication.
Everything worked out of the box. After starting the server it scanned my configured directories for media files and announced itself via UPnP. I instantly was able to browse my media files from the TV, watch pictures and videos and listen to music.
Summary:
A very nice toy.
I have seen few software working such smooth, easy to set up and use.
You don’t need to pull out your notebook, boot it up, connect to the TV, log in, operate the PC, … – Just sit back into your couch take the remote control and browse through your files.
If you regularly show pictures of your last holyday to friends and relatives or watch movies located on your harddisc I recommend having a look at the DLNA concept.
Category Entertainment, Linux No Comments »
Wednesday July 1st, 2009 10:15 pm (UTC)
Today I met Andreas Schneider, developer of the csync tool. This little program is designed to effectively synchronize files between a local directory and a smb share without mounting it. It is especially used for implementing roaming profiles in linux.
Andreas is also very interested in file synchronization and offline working concepts. We shared some ideas and discussed the aims of our projects.
He has many innovative approaches to file synchronization in general and I see many points for collaboration.
Category Linux, OFS No Comments »
Monday June 29th, 2009 10:54 pm (UTC)
We have decided to use extended attributes in OFS to enable communication between user and filesystem with standard linux tool. Today I came across the first disadvantage of this choice.
I was wondering why gedit claimed that it were not possible to save the backup file. After some debugging I discovered that it tried to copy all extended attributes from the original to the backup file.
In fact, this is a very good idea, especially when using ACLs (which are stored as extended attributes). In OFS we have a little problem with that. Think of setting the “ofs.available” flag to a random file inside the tree. This makes no sense is is denied by OFS. As a result, gedit failes in creating this file.
My fix for this was to hide the ofs.* attributes. This means I removed them from the listxattr FUSE callback, so that they are still available but get not exposed when someone asks for all available attributes.
I don’t know if using attributes which are not visible will raise new problems – time will show…
Category Linux, OFS No Comments »
Thursday June 18th, 2009 07:17 pm (UTC)
Today I visited university again. Three students held a presentation about caching strategies for OFS.
In March Professor Trommler started this project and the students did very good research since then. The approaches are promising and partially close to my own ideas about improvements in OFS.
I’m very keen on the implementation which will start about end of July, after they have finished their exams.
Category Linux, OFS, Uncategorized No Comments »
07:05 pm (UTC)
As promised I’ve posted a set of todos and open bugs to the OFS bugtracker.
I hope I’ll find the time to implement some and can motivate a few people to help me with the others. 
Category OFS No Comments »
Thursday June 11th, 2009 11:39 am (UTC)
To improve communication with our users, we set up a mailing list and a bugtracker for the OFS project.
The list works on a mailman based system, provided by sourceforge and since I didn’t like the SF internal tracker, I decided to use mantis for this. Well, I couldn’t find a better point in time to enable mantis. One day later SF announced in a mail, that they will restructure their hosted apps – this means URL will change over the next weeks. Never mind, the old ones will be redirected.
So far – I’ve created a list of TODOs for OFS and will hack them into the bugtracker now.
I encourage you to subscribe to the mailing list to keep up-to-date with the progress of OFS.
Category OFS 1 Comment »
Thursday May 28th, 2009 12:00 am (UTC)
I just returned from University. Professor Trommler and me held a presentation on OFS as we did in Chemnitz. For the first time I showed OFS working with a real remote share not only mirroring a directory on the local machine.
Our presentation took part in a series of monthly presentations organized by sage@guug Nuremberg.
Unfortunately the audience was not very large, but we had good discussions.
Category OFS No Comments »
