>One of the "high priority items" (fairly urgent, and 
>considered very important, at least here at Afilias) is the 
>implementation of Log Shipping, which ought to be an answer to 
>your problem.
>
>The idea of Log Shipping is that you can have a node that, 
>instead of syncing into a database, generates a series of 
>files containing the SQL queries to do the updates.  That 
>series of files may then be distributed to remote sites, and 
>applied into a database, giving you a replica that is as up to 
>date as the series of files.
>
>One such "log shipping" node can feed as many replicas as you 
>want it to.  There is no means of feeding anything back to the 
>origin, but it can certainly scale.
>
>So if what you want is to have (say) four reliable boxes at a 
>central site that talk to one another, each of which could 
>take over in a pinch, and then have a whole bunch of copies at 
>different sites, log shipping would allow that to work.
>
>It's not implemented yet, but our urgency level on it is 
>rather high, so there oughta be something at least beta-like 
>in the not too distant future.

Thanks! That does sound promising. Is there a spec anywhere that I could
take a look at? Some questions
that occur to me initially:

1) Is there still a subscription mechanism, for instance allowing the 
specification of a "type" of subscription?

2) Does the slon daemon handle the "shipping"?

3) How does a given subscriber node determine it's sync state vis a vis
the log
shipper?

Has code for this gone into cvs HEAD for the project, or are you folks
just working
on it locally? So many questions....

If it is in HEAD, I would be interested in taking on some tasks, if you
need help. Failing that, I would
also be eager to help with testing, etc., since this is a feature I
really need!

Thanks.

- DAP