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Synchronizing offline files via CIFS

idar
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
I have been recently evaluating Alfresco's CIFS synchronization capabilities for keeping certain spaces always available offline, and have found it to be very unreliable. E.g. when working in Windows 7, things seem to break when editing files (MS Office documents) offline and then selecting "Work Online" in order to update the state of the locally changed files in the Alfresco repository. This is not the case when working with Windows XP, where the behaviour is much more consinstent (yet not absolutely reliable).

Access via CIFS is probably the most crucial feature for me, and as I have found that working online via CIFS is much too slow to be considered acceptable in terms of usability, it seems that I have no other option than trying to benefit from using offline synchronization. Has anyone encountered similar problems regarding performance (CIFS online) and reliability (offline synchronization)? Could it be something wrong with my configuration (server-side)?

The version I use for evaluation is Community 3.4.a.


PS: WebDAV access, seems to be slightly better in terms of performance than CIFS. Are you aware of any tools that could be used to cache Alfresco content offline via WebDAV in order to simulate the Sync feature of CIFS?
2 REPLIES 2

flefoll
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
Hi,

We used alfresco, on different versions, for about 3 years,
And each release we arrived to the very same conclusions than yours:
- CIFS performances are shameful
- CIFS replication/synchro are shameful (even worst using default Microsoft mechanism)
- Webdav rocks (performance and consistency)
- FTP rocks (performance and consistency)

There is many tools to ensure FTP and Webdav folder synchro
(java portable one : http://sourceforge.net/projects/webdav-sync/)

Even if it's not provided by default on your windows desktops, I believe it worth’s to guarantee real service, instead of supposedly easy deployment.

Regards,

Francois Lefoll

craig_michael_n
Champ on-the-rise
Champ on-the-rise
I also have been having problems with CIFS and it being slow. Does anyone know how to optimize CIFS? I am currently using a Red Hat server