Network-based filesystems

[depontius]

My home LAN is getting some major updates shortly, and I'm trying to figure out what to do.

I'm not sure I want to stick with NFS - it has its problems. The most notable problem is with firefox/thunderbird .sqlite files. When those files are on NFS and firefox/thunderbird syncs them, it stalls my desktop for something like 30 seconds. I looked into it a bit and found that this was not an uncommon complaint, so I've symlinked firefox and thunderbird directories to local disk instead of NFS.

What I'd really like is some sort of mirroring filesystem, but from what I can see mirroring filesystems are pretty much peer-based and plan on "reliable peers". My client machines get powered off at night, so they're not "reliable."

1 - Is there some sort of mirroring or cluster filesystem that works with a reliable server and "unreliable" (may power off) clients?

2 - Is there some other solution I'm missing? I'm basically after Single System Image, from a /home point of view.

3 - Perhaps part of the problem is that my current server is an 800MHz Pentium-III and my clients are all amd64. That's one of the changes about to happen - my oldest amd64 machine is about to switch from client to server. However it is the oldest/slowest amd64 machine, so the performance problem may persist. However the native disks will be moving from ATA100 (or maybe ATA133 - I'm not sure I was able to get full speed out of them) to SATA-II, though I'm not sure how much that's really worth.

Suggestions/insights welcome.
_________________
.sigs waste space and bandwidth