[ale] Two offices, one data pool

[greg.freemyer at gmail.com (Greg Freemyer)]

Too many thoughts in here for me to keep up, but here is what I would
consider for the solution:

DRBD to do block/sector level replication between two servers.  It's
in the vanilla linux kernel for a year or two now.  Even before that
it was heavily used.  WAN for the interconnect is supported.  I know
SLES has supported DRBD for years (even before it got in the vanilla
kernel.) I don't know about RedHat.

Put a cluster filesystem on top of that.  DRBD supports a couple, but
I don't recall the pros/cons.

Then Samba on top of that.

Then normal office tools, but for "shared" work I would recommend OneNote.

It's part of the standard Microsoft Office platform, but it is
actually multi-user.

Ie. two people can be working on the same doc at the same time,  Edits
are reflected to the other user within 10 or 15 seconds on a LAN.

It does not have full formatting like Word, but it's not too bad.  The
2010 version tracks which user made which edit I believe, so everyone
can see who did what.

No idea how it works on a WAN.  And the 2007 version does not do
spreadsheet stuff at all.  I haven't worked with 2010 yet, so I don't
know what it can do.

Greg