Unison

From Openmoko

Revision as of 05:23, 25 November 2008 by Lokomoko (Talk | contribs)

Jump to: navigation, search

Unison File Synchronizer

Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. See the manual for a detailed look at it's capabilities.

Unison comes in two flavors:

  • Text mode only version (debian package name: unison)
  • GTK-based graphical version (debian package name: unison-gtk)

Unison can sync

  • between two directory trees on the same computer or
  • between directory trees on two separate machines.

For syncing desktop machine and Neo we use the latter. The recommended way to do this is the remote shell method: We start unison or unison-gtk on the desktop PC. The program will connect to the Neo via ssh and start a text-only instance of unison on the Neo to retrieve new files or deltas and to modify files on the Neo.

For this to work, ssh may not output any text itself, because unison parses the first line of console output to determine the version of unison on the remote computer. So we setup ssh for public key authentication:

  • Create a key pair on the desktop PC
  • Configure the desktop PC for public key authentication
  • Add the public key of the desktop PC to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the Neo
Retrieved from "http://wiki.openmoko.org/index.php?title=Unison&oldid=60483"
Personal tools

Unison File Synchronizer

Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. See the manual for a detailed look at it's capabilities.

Unison comes in two flavors:

  • Text mode only version (debian package name: unison)
  • GTK-based graphical version (debian package name: unison-gtk)

Unison can sync

  • between two directory trees on the same computer or
  • between directory trees on two separate machines.

For syncing desktop machine and Neo we use the latter. The recommended way to do this is the remote shell method: We start unison or unison-gtk on the desktop PC. The program will connect to the Neo via ssh and start a text-only instance of unison on the Neo to retrieve new files or deltas and to modify files on the Neo.

For this to work, ssh may not output any text itself, because unison parses the first line of console output to determine the version of unison on the remote computer. So we setup ssh for public key authentication:

  • Create a key pair on the desktop PC
  • Configure the desktop PC for public key authentication
  • Add the public key of the desktop PC to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the Neo