[gamin] gamin distributed NFS support

[Moritz Augustin <moritz augustin tu-harburg de>]

I'm new to gamin and fam, but need such a program to monitor the 
maildirs on an nfs-mounted volume. The problem is that the changes to 
the remote filesystem are not everytime made locally. So the kernel 
notification to the gamin daemon cannot work because gamin is running 
locally and the kernel notification is only at the nfs storage server.

In detail I've got a mail cluster using nfs storage with about 10k 
active users. The MTA/MDA hosts save mails in the maildirs of my users. 
Now the requirement is that the IMAP servers (running on other machines 
than the MTAs) should get information about remote file additions on 
their NFS-mounted maildirs. This is to have support for the IDLE 
extension of IMAP.

To poll the opened folders every $intervall second is too expensive - it 
would be great just to get the realtime information exactly when the 
filesystem is modified.

My question is (because I know there are other people needing exactly 
the same) if it would be hard to build a server-client relationship 
between to gamin-daemons. The client would act as a normal gamin daemon 
on the one host but has also capabilities to have a efficient look at 
nfs-made changes because the server-gamin reports every modification 
instantly.


Am I going crazy or does it sound (despite of my english ;-)) reasonable?


Hoping to get response,

Regards
Moritz Augustin
Technical University Hamburg-Harburg