Creating an in-house Dropbox: Phase 1

Create a Central Repository

Create a folder on a large hard drive or raid your main computer/server

For example:

mkdir /meda/drobo/inhouseDropbox

On the repository machine install Unison

sudo apt-get install unison

On the local machine connect via SSH and test that the install went ok

ssh yourhostname unison -version

You should see something like, “unison version 2.27.57”.

Create a file in your repository directory:

test.txt

Install Unison on the Local Machine

For a Debian based system do:

sudo apt-get install unison

Make a folder in your home directory or wherever you want:

mkdir /home/nixtutor/inhouseDropbox

Then run Unison:

unison inhouseDropbox/ ssh://nixtutor//media/drobo/inhouseDropbox

Note the double slash after the hostname. This is used to indicate an absolute path

You will be greeted with a message saying that this is the first time it has detected changes go ahead and hit the space bar.

Press y to confirm the “conflict” and transfer the files. This should only happen the first time you setup a new directory.

Setup Unison

Create a inhouseDropbox.prf file and stick it in ‘/home/youruser/.unison’.

If should look something like:

root = /home/youruser/inhouseDropbox root = ssh://youruser@yourhost//media/drobo/inhouseDropbox force = newer times = true batch = true

Now we have automated preferences and just need to get rid of the password prompt for SSH. The most common method of this is making a key file.

Making a key

On the local machine do ssh-keygen. Then scp the .pub file and append it to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on the remote computer. If you need additional help on how to make SSH keys see, Setting Up SSH Keys

Automating it

Running Unison by hand doesn’t do us much good. Let’s make Cron run it every two minutes or so.

crontab -e

Then add the following line:

*/2 * * * * /usr/bin/unison inhouseDropbox > /dev/null

Then save the file.

To test it go ahead and drop another file in the folder and wait a few minutes. The changes should propagate to the central repository.

Troubleshooting

Use

tail -f /var/log/crond

To see if cron is running the job.

You can also append, >> /home/youruser/log.txt 2>&1 instead of > /dev/null to output all errors and regular messages to a log file in your home directory.