Axel

Axel is a researcher at McMurdo Station -- a research station based in the Antarctic. Unfortunately, due to environmental conditions, Axel's data is actually stored on a file server located in Berkeley, California.

Normally, Axel's data connection is very solid and rarely goes down, but unfortunately when working on a file located more than 12500 miles away, the latency between his local computer and the fileserver is more than a second in both directions. When working on a spreadsheet containing time-lapse results of a year-long observation of the ice there, he saves quite often. Ideally, Axel would like his saves to local disk to be immediate, with only the small incremental changes to the file uploaded over a period of time.

Hans

Hans is the lead physical therapist for his company, Scandanavian Neck and Back Care. During his day-to-day duties of seeing patients and helping them get back into the swing of things, he keeps track of how each of them are doing in many disorganized files in his home directory.

Recently during a morning consultation with a patient recovering from a crushed disc caused by a flying hippo, Hans' file server randomly failed to accept writes to his notes. Later on, at about noon, the file server eventually crashed completely, leaving him without his notes entirely. Ideally, Hans would like all of his writes to be stored locally first and propagated later, with often-read data already cached locally as well.

Helga

Helga is a systems administrator for the Yggdrasil web hosting company. Being a company that symbolizes the tree of life and the home of the Norse Gods, they occasionally get requests to host most of the lesser God's blogs and websites. Unfortunately, being a web hosting company for the Gods, downtime is unacceptible. In fact, the last major outage they had resulted in the last systems adminsitrator being fried on the spot when Thor couldn't post his latest blog entry about olive pizza.

Helga's systems mostly serve static content, but she hates having to manually use rsync to update it on her web farm. She's tried using NFS to solve this problem, but when her fileserver dies off, the entire system fails. Ideally, she would prefer a combination of NFS and rsync, so when the fileserver falls apart the web frontends can continue serving content with no downtime.

Yojimbo

A respectful and technologically advanced ronin, Yojimbo is often seen wandering from place to place protecting others and their property for a price. Unfortunately, with all of this travelling, he has little time to fight with syncronization between his laptop and server at home.

Recently, Yojimbo accepted a client in Washington state and has less than an hour to catch the flight to meet them. While working on the invoice for his last client's services, he lost track of time and quickly suspended his laptop (without unmounting his NFS home directory or closing the spreadsheet) while running out of his apartment. While sitting on the plane, he would like to pick up where he left off and continue working the invoice to completion.