Preserved Topic: Perl FTP Idea (Feasible?)

Ok, I have been mulling over an idea for a couple of days, wondering if, and how feasible it would be. To ultimately come to the conclusion, that yes, in theory it appears to be a good idea, in practice it may have less than desired results.

Picture your webhost, picture your computer. Now picture your computer having a directory that mirrors that of your host's directory structure.

Now say you make a change to the contents of the mirrored directory structure on your computer. You then go onto the web and take a look at your site, magically the site mirrors your change.

The magik was in the perl script that runs either on intervals, on changes to the directory structure, or when pl FTPmirror.pl is typed into the command line. It then connects to your FTP server and sends both the changed files as well as newly created files, and also deletes files that were changed.

I would beleive this to be possible, and I would think it to be a semi-decent tool, yet I do not often see something as simple as this implemented. Is there a reason? Is there a large feasibility issue here?

Doing something like this would almost seem like running the server on your own computer, but your not, it is on your hosts, and the responsibility for making sure the servers are up is taken off of you.

Any comments or ideas about this?

-mage-

we use rsync to mirror things between servers, not server-to-client though.

Sounds like a job for DAV, which runs as an Apache module, and M$ Web Folders, which you get with IE5.5. I've been wanting to get it working, but haven't had time to play.

It gets interesting when multiple people can make edits to the server, and I think DAV handles that, although I've never tried it, like I say.

foreach $dirtydiaper (@diapers) { s/$dirtydiaper/$cleandiaper/g; }

OK, I can say for sure now that this does work. I'll play with it for a while but I think I'll like it quite a bit.

I don't yet understand all the security issues. I'm using mod_dav on Apache 1.3.19 on a FreeBSD machine on my desk (install with apxs took 15 minutes). I'm accessing it throught MS Webfolders from IE 5.5 on my Win98 client machine. It just looks like the local filesystem, but has a little different behavior.

Anyway, read more at http://www.webdav.org/ if you like. The idea of HTTP being superior to FTP for file transfers is cool. Also I like not having to write the script! I'll need to get a better handle on security and concurrentcy before I let my developers have this toy.

Thanks for the link, and the info.

-mage-