Sharity 3 Implementation Examples

Mac user needs access to company’s server

If you have a Mac, the only Mac in your company, nobody will be considerate of that fact (the same applies to Linux, FreeBSD etc, of course). If you want to access the company’s file server, they won’t install special software on the server just for you. They won’t even change a configuration option.

You install Sharity on your computer. This way the server does not even notice that you use a different operating system. You can access all files on the server in the same way as your colleagues.

Developer working on cross platform application

Let’s say you are a software developer and your application must run on Windows and Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, whatever). Most of the time you develop on Windows, but from time to time you must test on Unix. You could copy the entire source tree over to Unix, do some compile - run - fix cycles and then copy the source tree back. However, you probably want to avoid the confusion caused by source tree copies. Which of the two is more recent today? Confused the direction of the copy again?

You can avoid these problems altogether by installing Sharity on the Unix side. You don’t copy the source tree, you use it directly on the Windows machine.

Web server runs on Unix, needs files from Windows

Let’s say you have a big dynamic website with a database connection and all sorts of things. This website runs on a Unix server. Now you must bring a catalog online, but the catalog’s images are all on the company’s Windows file server. You can’t just copy all images over to Unix because they are many and because they are updated frequently.

You install Sharity on the Unix server. Then you establish a permanent mount by creating a symbolic link pointing into /CIFS and store a login for the web server user in Sharity’s keychain. The web server can access the files without user interaction now.

Backup server collects data from all over the net

You can set up a Unix server for automated nightly backups. It connects to all Windows workstations through Sharity and makes a tar backup of the workstation’s entire disk. The backup script uses Sharity’s command line interface to mount and unmount each workstation. The backup user’s credentials are best stored in Sharity’s keychain.

Specialized software only available for Unix

Let’s say you have some really important specialized piece of software which is only available for Unix. This can be a video or image processing software running on an SGI, a workstation controlling special hardware or whatever. Part or even most of your workflow is done on Windows, though.

In this case you can use Sharity to couple the file systems. An image processing software can render directly to the Windows server where the file may even be usable before it is complete.