(Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)

P.S. The error was actually caused by a non-standard character in the filename (+). I’ll be filing a bug with eXtplorer for that

Documentation (Wiki) can also be found here.

NOTE: Replace [user] with the username under which the Dropbox folder is located.
NOTE: Replace [FQDN] with either your IP address or the hostname (or FQDN) which you’ll be using to access the interface.

NOTE: This HOWTO assumes that you will be running apache as the user ‘apache’ and that you have already set up your Dropbox account syncing to your /home/[user]/Dropbox folder

To get Dropbox running with apache and extplorer you need to get the following packages:

yum install php httpd

Make the VirtualHost director and get permissions / groups correct:

mkdir /var/www/dropbox
chown apache:apache /var/www/dropbox
usermod -aG [user] apache
usermod -aG apache [user]

Now create and populate an apache virtualhost config file:

vim /etc/httpd/conf.d/dropbox.conf

Populate it with the following text:

NameVirtualHost *:80
    <VirtualHost *:80>
        DocumentRoot "/var/www/dropbox"
        ServerName [FQDN]
        <Directory "/var/www/dropbox">
            allow from all
            Options +Indexes
            AuthType Basic
            AuthName "Dropbox"
            AuthUserFile /var/www/passwd
            Require valid-user
        </Directory>
    </VirtualHost>

Now add a username / password to access your interface via HTTP auth:

htpasswd -cm /var/www/passwd yourusername
chown apache.apache /var/www/passwd

Make sure that apache has full group access to your Dropbox folder.

chmod g+x /home/[user]
chmod g+rw /home/[user]/Dropbox
find /home/[user]/Dropbox -type d -exec chmod g+x {} ;

Download the latest version of eXtplorer from http://extplorer.sourceforge.net/

cd /var/www/dropbox
wget http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/extplorer/eXtplorer_2.0.1.zip
unzip eXtplorer*.zip

Check we haven’t made any mistakes and set the services up:

service httpd configtest
service httpd restart
chkconfig httpd on

You can now log into http://[FQDN] using a browser and the default credentials (admin/admin) and set up your user, pointing the user’s “Home directory:” at /home/[user]Dropbox. Once you have set up your user you have the choice to remove the HTTP authentication which we included in the VirtualHost configuration above. Simply comment out (or delete) the following lines from your /etc/httpd/conf.d/dropbox.conf file:

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Dropbox"
AuthUserFile /var/www/passwd
Require valid-user

That’s it, you’re done!

(Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)

Ok, so if you watch the above video I’m sure you’re going to get the jist of what I’m trying to portray. With Jing you can record whatever’s on your screen, so you can provide instructions to someone or show someone what’s happening on your screen without having to set up remote access etc. Then you can save your Jing screen cast file in your Dropbox folder which will then automatically upload the video to your online storage. If you save the screencast file in your Dropbox public folder you can then just navigate to your Dropbox folder, right click on the file, grab the public URL and send it to whoever you want to see it.

The above video is hosted live in my Dropbox, if it’s broken then it’s probably because I deleted it from my Dropbox folder :/

Incidentally, on yesterday I became one of Dropbox’s first paying customers, as they’re trialling their payment system and I was invited to be amongst the first to test it out. To be honest 50GB is quite a large amount of space, especially for file sync’ing. It’s still nice peace of mind for off-site backup though!

Rather than run the installation on my live server(s), I decided to do a test install on a Virtual Machine. I fired up VMWare and created a minimal installation of CentOS (and I mean minimal) and after installing VMware tools I installed the GNOME desktop along with the X11 Window Manager. I normally use KDE, but unfortunately Dropbox only currently supports Nautilus and not Konqueror .

yum --exclude=nautilus-sendto groupinstall 'X Window System' 'GNOME Desktop Environment'

Now, officially CentOS is not supported by Dropbox, there are no packages for CentOS provided by Dropbox so I thought I’d get the source and see what I could do with it. The package requirements are higher than the CentOS package versions available through traditional channels. I thought I’d have a pop anyway and document how far I got here. The two key problems are that Dropbox require glib2 version to be at least 2.14.0 and libnotify needs to be at least 0.4.4. CentOS 5.2 (current release at time of writing) only has packages for glib2 at 2.12.3-2 and libnotify at 0.4.2-6. I wasn’t about to let that stop my potential enjoyment of Dropbox though, so I installed the other dependencies using yum:

yum install bzip2 wget make gtk+-devel libnotify-devel nautilus-extensions.i386 nautilus-devel.i386 gnome-vfs2-devel compat-glibc-headers.i386 compat-glibc.i386 gnome-desktop-devel.i386

Then I got the latest source from the DropBox download page and untarred it:

wget http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/5143/nautilus-dropbox-packages/0.4.1/nautilus-dropbox-0.4.1.tar.bz2
tar jxf nautilus-dropbox-0.4.1.tar.bz2

Next, I had to alter the configure script to accept our versions of glib2 and libnotify which was just a matter of finding and replacing

GLIB_REQUIRED=2.14.0
LIBNOTIFY_REQUIRED=0.4.4

with

GLIB_REQUIRED=2.12.0
LIBNOTIFY_REQUIRED=0.4.2

Then I ran the

./configure
make
make install

Everything seemed to compile ok. Time to fire up the desktop… GNOME launched ok, but nautilus refuses to load. The problem is revealed when trying to start nautilus from the command line:

[rob@localhost ~]$ nautilus /home/rob
Initializing nautilus-dropbox 0.4.1
nautilus: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-1.0/libnautilus-dropbox.so: undefined symbol: g_timeout_add_seconds

It looks like Dropbox really does require the specified versions of those packages which is a real shame. So in short, unless anyone comes up with a workaround, or Dropbox release a more compatible version it looks like there’s no awesomeness to be had with Dropbox and CentOS / RHEL

Never-the-less the awesomeness still reigns on the Windows platform!

But now the team behind Dropbox have launched publicly and everyone is free to join the wonderful warmth of online file storage, file sharing and file collaboration done right – with a big dose of awesome to keep everyone sweet.

Recently Apple have released their solution to the “cloud” service, called “MobileMe”. Unfortunately they’ve been upstaged by Dropbox, by a large factor. MobileMe Apple pissed me off when they snuck it in as an unwanted and un-notified installation along with an update to iTunes, just as they evilly did with their Safari installation. I gave MobileMe a shot, as it came with a free 30 day trial – and for a time, it was good – but then came along the public release of Dropbox and since I use Zimbra the contact / calendar syncing offered by MobileMe doesn’t really appeal to me. To do a direct comparison between the two would be unfair as MobileMe has contact / calendar synchronisation, whereas Dropbox doesn’t. However the storage side of things in Dropbox walk all over the MobileMe service.

I’ve already started using it for little things which are so unbelievably handy, for example in my line of work I use screencapping / screenshots a lot. Communicating a screenshot should be an easy thing, unfortunately it tends not to be. For example, I’d take the screenshot, dump it into an image editor, crop it, save it to a folder, then sftp it to a webserver, get the URL and then IM the URL to whoever I wanted to see it. With Dropbox running it’s just a matter of saving the edited screenshot to my public folder in my Dropbox directory, right-click on it and “Copy public link” and then IM it to whoever – since Dropbox automatically uploads anything in the Dropbox folder to the Dropbox server it completely removes the need to SFTP it anywhere.

That’s just one example of the awesomeness though. I’ve got my important docs in my Dropbox folder and can work on them either on my work PC or my home PC and every time I save a change it’s automatically uploaded and replicated across all my other computers using my Dropbox account.

I’ve got my girlfriends’ entire My Documents folder as her own Dropbox and a folder under her My Documents folder is shared between us at all times, across all computers, and replicated instantly across them all. Which makes it incredibly handy any time I need to edit or view a file she’s working on etc. She can even collaborate on Excel files with another charity worker where previously Google Docs was the only other viable collaborative alternative.

Now it’s just a matter of getting Dropbox to work with CentOS 5.2 (here’s hoping!)

[Aferthought by rob on Sunday, September 14, 2008 at 2:16 pm]

I thought I’d actually make a quick mention here of humyo since I did try their service also for a while. Humyo was good, to an extent, and has probably improved since I stopped using it – however I felt it was strongly restricted due to the fact that it offered no direct file system interaction – everything was done via a web-browser. When I tried the service there was no client application which could be installed on a desktop to provide simple, direct file interaction between what’s stored on the humyo servers and what’s stored on the local workstation. I believe they’ve since introduced a drive mapping application and “sync” software which allows backup and file replication across computers. I haven’t tried their new client app, since (a) I don’t use their service any more and (b) you actually have to pay for it after your 14 day trial runs out. After the trial runs out you are back to having to do all your file management via a web browser again – or pay. Ouch. That said, humyo offer 30Gb free, compared to Dropbox’s 2Gb. To be perfectly honest, I’d much rather manage a restrictive 2Gb worth of files and folders using a transparent tool such as DropBox’s implementation than try and manage 30Gb of files and folders using a flash-based website.