[p4] synchronizing depots in two physically distant Perforce servers - Chuck Karish - com.perforce.perforce-user

3 messages in com.perforce.perforce-user[p4] synchronizing depots in two phys...

From	Sent On	Attachments
Greg Barwis	24 Sep 2002 10:11
Steve Smythe	24 Sep 2002 10:50
Chuck Karish	24 Sep 2002 22:23

Subject:	[p4] synchronizing depots in two physically distant Perforce servers
From:	Chuck Karish (kar...@well.com)
Date:	09/24/2002 10:23:22 PM
List:	com.perforce.perforce-user

At 12:11 PM 9/24/2002 -0500, Greg Barwis wrote:

In our environment, the machine hosting our Perforce server is at our main
office. We use it quite a bit over the LAN for our local development teams. We
also have a collection of servers at a remote datacenter, to which we are
connected by a trio of T-1 lines.

Are the remote servers on a single high-speed network?

We frequently need to update the code on these servers. This involves taking
down our public service, synchronizing roughly a dozen servers to the latest
label in Perforce across the T-1 lines, and then bringing our public service
back online. Because this can involve the transfer of gigabytes of data across
T-1 lines (which also carry our building s regular Internet traffic), it means
excessive downtime for our public servers.

Work out a system that sends only one copy of the data across the slow links.
Use something like rsync to synchronize the servers to the single remote master copy
of the data.

I would like to install a Perforce server at the remote datacenter, so that when
we label-sync our public servers, the data is moving across a local gigabit
network instead of a remote T-1 network. Is there any way to maintain the data
in our local depot (at the office), and have the remote server maintain a
current copy of the local depot so that when we need to synchronize the remote
public servers, we can direct their clientspecs to the Perforce server at the
datacenter instead?

If you really want to use Perforce for this purpose, one way would be to use vcp to pack up the changes at the development site, copy the batched changes to the remote site, import them into the remote server, and then sync the other systems at the remote site. This would seem not to be worthwhile unless there's development going on at both sites. You won't be able to keep the change
numbers in sync between the two servers. Perforce doesn't have a mechanism to do that for you.