Last week’s techmail was Set up Dropbox on a GUI-less Linux server which takes you through the necessary steps of setting up Dropbox on a GUI-less Linux box. I use Dropbox here for keeping certain files in sync between systems, but I also am connected to a secondary Dropbox to act as a remote backup for a long-standing client of mine. It works great; they have two systems that share data (encrypted disk images), and I’ve also had to run a second copy of Dropbox on my system here to keep a copy of that data, but I was then rsyncing it to my remote backup server as well. With this, I can skip my system at home as being the “middle man” and get that remote backup server (headless CentOS 5) linked to the Dropbox instead. Saves bandwidth and headaches.
For anyone who uses runit, the following is a script to supervise dropboxd as a specific user. With runit I can connect to as many independent Dropbox accounts as I like, running each under a specific user.
#!/bin/execlineb # $Id: run 849 2009-04-19 21:33:01Z vdanen $ /bin/fdmove -c 2 1 /bin/export PATH "/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin" /bin/export HOME "/home/vdanen" /bin/cd /home/vdanen/.dropbox-dist /sbin/chpst -u vdanen /home/vdanen/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
Read the tip for how to get it all setup.