tensixtyone

Dropbox is out of closed beta and is open for the public, but what is more interesting is that they now have a client for Linux. I’ve had a beta email sat in my inbox for about 3-4 months, but I’ve never got round to signing up as I couldn’t get a client for Linux.

Dropbox is one of the new wave of online storage, sort of a cross between WebDAV and SVN, in fact, I’d say its almost exactly like SVN, just with a nice GUI. I guess all it would need to take the “value-added” part of this product is for someone to develop a nice front end for Amazon S3, and by looking at their future prices it could be cheaper.

Anyway, picking out the bits of the service is not what I’m here to do. At the moment I run a Debian Testing/Unstable desktop machine, I was quite disappointed to not see a specific Debian package for their software on the website. I realised after a few dumb minutes that I could use the Ubuntu packages.

In sources.list, I referenced their Gusty archive

deb http://www.getdropbox.com/static/ubuntu gutsy main

Then in /etc/apt/preferences I set some basic package pinning to make sure that any packages didn’t collide with the existing Debian repository, not likely but you never know.

Package: *
Pin: release a=gutsy
Pin-Priority: 400

Do a “apt-get update” and you should have the “nautilus-dropbox” package available to install. Simple!

Remember, you’ll need to restart nautilus by either killing it (killall -9 nautilus) or restarting your Gnome session.

[edit: Fixed the first URL]

Finally, i’ve got round to moving the /misc folder off onto Amazon S3. I’ve decided to do this due to my upcoming hosting move, not having to worry about several hundred megabytes of static data will ease the strain of moving. So, how have I done it?

First of all I created a bucket on S3 with the name assets.nikdoof.net, from there I setup a CNAME in BIND for assets.nikdoof.net pointing to s3.amazonaws.com to allow direct referencing to the files within the bucket.

assets.nikdoof.net.     IN      CNAME   s3.amazonaws.com.

Then for the relocation of the misc folder, setup a simple Apache mod_rewrite rule to transfer all requests for the misc folder to S3.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/misc/(.*)$ http://assets.nikdoof.net/$1 [R,L]

So now it’s all up and working, and to give it a try yourself, here is a fetching wallpaper of Rachel Stevens.

After a few days of thinking i’ve decided it’s time to move away from Textdrive onto GMail and my own hosting. Why? Well lets have a quick overview.

1. Memory allocation on shared servers

Recently i’ve been dogged with Mephisto spitting feathers after a few page requests, saying it’s hit its memory limit and the MySQL lib can’t run a command. This is a new change that happend on the TxD servers which i’m not impressed about, especially how the process never seems to tick over the acceptable limits for ruby processes.

2. Joyent

Joyent, the Gmail replacement, or so I thought. Over the last few months its suffered from developer time being concentrated on the wrong areas. Want to make a mail alias for your Joyent account? No you cant, but you can make spiffy lists…

If the guys at Joyent actually worked on features that are needed and not what they want to develop then its quite possible that i’d stick with it. Another fantastic example is that you can’t mark mail as read/unread, even simple webmail clients have this feature but it seems to escape Joyent.

3. Mish-mash of solutions

Textdrive shared hosting run via Webmin, Mail via Joyent or Webmin however you want to do it, Billing related changes via another control panel, Storage space via another panel.

I can understand that Textdrive/Strongspace/Joyent are three products that have been thrown together into the all encompassing “Joyent Core” but they should of worked on the integration before they announced it.

4. All or nothing

I like Strongspace, I like the idea, but now i’ve got to have Textdrive hosting and Joyent mail with it as well, all i want is Strongspace, nothing more. integration is a good thing but why an’t we allowed to buy seperate services? I could go for Bingodisk but that doesnt support rsync. After a quick investigation it seems that S3 is my best bet, and probably a bit cheaper.

So, theres a quick run down of my dealbreakers, the issues i’ve been living with for the last few months. I currently pay around £15 for a low powered dedicated server in London which I hardly make use of, due to the traffic I get to my sites it seems like a good candidate. I’ll use Google Apps for Domains for my mail and related stuff, and S3 for backup. Now, the long trawl of migration…