Many companies implement network license of Baan on more than 1 servers and replicate data and environment across 2 servers in order to insure against any disasters and maintain smooth flow of business operations in future by making system available all the time.

There could be many approaches to this. One apprach may be to update database online using database vendor's online replication capabilities .This approach take care off all database tables but not Baan file system objects (like program script, program object, report script , report object , forms,dlls , menus, includes , library files ($BSE/lib),table and domain dictionaries) which also are required to run the application successfully. One approach could be refresh the backup server at the day end with file system objects of primary server. However this approach has 2 problems.
1. File system objects could be restored only till the point of last backup and not till the point of failure.
2. Certain file system objects like table and domain dictionary may render table/domain unusable if it is different from actuals in the database (errors like 512 can come in backup server for tables which are reconfigured but their dictionaries not replicated across the backup server).

We have written a 3GL program which is attached to session without main table (so no form). This program reads the values of file system object from tools sessions which create/modify/delete this file system objects, compares these file system object across servers and refresh the same to baackup server if different.

Table and domain dictionaries have been replicated differently. 2 customized tables parallel to Baan table ttadv502 and ttadv501 are created. These are compared and updated for differences. Based on differences , file system objects are replicated (.new / .old / original)

This program checks file system object differences at regular frequence of 2 seconds .User can change this frequencey depending on his/her convenience.

Pre-requisite
000 company and live companies are replicated online through database.It work in Baan IV.It may be compiled and tested in BaanERP also.

Usage
This program can be run in 2 ways .
1. It can be used as a startup session in Baan in the startup group for people who do the customization and development. The program will close automatically when user closes Baan. For 1 user only 1 instance of this program will run. Subsequent runs will close automatically.
2.This session can be attached in a development menu (like tuddc00000000 ) at all development
sessions (nodes) of the menu and procesinfo be updated with the real development session code. This will make this program start in the background and this program in turn starting the real development session.

Caution
Users may need to change this program to suit their need in following aspects
1.Customized tables/hostnames / languges
2. File system objects to be replicated have to be decided (e.g. static library files may not be replicated).Further good testing before putting such code to use is mandatory.
3.We have used shell command at some place. User can replace the same with run.prog and OS
dependent commands.

Somehow earlier attachment can not be seen. Here is the program.

Hitesh,

Thats a nice program. Since you are on Unix, I am curious did you ever try to use the rsync commands -

rsync rsync
NAME
rsync - faster, flexible replacement for rcp

SYNOPSIS
rsync [OPTION]... SRC [SRC]... [USER@]HOST:DEST

rsync [OPTION]... [USER@]HOST:SRC DEST

rsync [OPTION]... SRC [SRC]... DEST

rsync [OPTION]... [USER@]HOST::SRC [DEST]

rsync [OPTION]... SRC [SRC]... [USER@]HOST::DEST

rsync [OPTION]... rsync://[USER@]HOST[:PORT]/SRC [DEST]

rsync [OPTION]... SRC [SRC]... rsync://[USER@]HOST[:PORT]/DEST

DESCRIPTION
rsync is a program that behaves in much the same way that rcp does,
but has many more options and uses the rsync remote-update protocol to
greatly speed up file transfers when the destination file already
exists.

The rsync remote-update protocol allows rsync to transfer just the
differences between two sets of files across the network link, using
an efficient checksum-search algorithm described in the technical
report that accompanies this package.

Some of the additional features of rsync are:

o support for copying links, devices, owners, groups and
permissions

o exclude and exclude-from options similar to GNU tar

o a CVS exclude mode for ignoring the same files that CVS would
ignore

o can use any transparent remote shell, including rsh or ssh

o does not require root privileges

o pipelining of file transfers to minimize latency costs

o support for anonymous or authenticated rsync servers (ideal for
mirroring)

GENERAL
There are eight different ways of using rsync. They are:

rsync
o for copying local files. This is invoked when neither source nor
destination path contains a : separator
o for copying from the local machine to a remote machine using a
remote shell program as the transport (such as rsh or ssh). This
is invoked when the destination path contains a single :
separator.
o for copying from a remote machine to the local machine using a
remote shell program. This is invoked when the source contains a
: separator.
o for copying from a remote rsync server to the local machine. This
is invoked when the source path contains a :: separator or a
rsync:// URL.
o for copying from the local machine to a remote rsync server. This
is invoked when the destination path contains a :: separator or a
rsync:// URL.
o for copying from a remote machine using a remote shell program as
the transport, using rsync server on the remote machine. This is
invoked when the source path contains a :: separator and the --
rsh=COMMAND (aka "-e COMMAND") option is also provided.
o for copying from the local machine to a remote machine using a
remote shell program as the transport, using rsync server on the
remote machine. This is invoked when the destination path
contains a :: separator and the --rsh=COMMMAND option is also
provided.
o for listing files on a remote machine. This is done the same way
as rsync transfers except that you leave off the local
destination.


There might be another option of using Baan Exchange with Multi Site Control tools.

We did check file synchronizer program like Unison file synchronizer and Safekit tool. Unision seemed to match the requirement but it required lot of setups which we did not wish to do. And safekit had lot of capabilities which we did not require.

I think rsync is a utility similar to Unision. I don't know about it in detail. But from what I read in ur post , it seems to be faster & flexible replacement for rcp . As I understand RCP is a batch mode remote copy. Definitely we did not want batch mode .

Further the online file sysncronizers utilities like Unision has to monitor entire file systems for this which puts good burden on system resources.

The exchange utitlities u talk about (environment) does not exist in Baan IV. Baan IV exchange works only at table level.

If u see this program work only for the file system objects which changes through Baan. It's sort of incremental online backup with least burden of system resources.

Hope this explains our decision to write a program for this requirement.