well, that went ... not so badly ...

By basd on Jun 2, 2010 | In linux, opensuse, cloud computing

Avid readers of this blog (yeah, right) will remember that a year or so ago, I launched into my iFolders experiment. For a long time, I have not had a satisfactory backup/synchronization system. The more critical stuff gets encrypted and shoved onto my ISP provided website, the rest of the stuff just risks total borkization.

...

My first go-round with iFolders was an "almost," but two things happened: I ran into various learning curve issues and I ran out of time to mess with it.

Oh, I ran out of space as well.

So, I had purchased a larger USB drive which has been languishing unused (but running, so I suppose I am wearing it out before it actually does anything useful.) The reason was that drive in its purchased state was a vfat drive. Who wants that? I wanted to use it for my iFolders backup and other storage purposes relating to my linux installs, which meant repartitioning and I was afraid I would accidentally repartition the wrong drive and bork my entire existence.

The project languished.

Finally, in a spurt of enthusiasm or something, I repartitioned with the KDE Partition Manager (no problem there, just a planning issue: Should I keep some VFAT? If so, how much? Should I have an NTFS partition? If so, how much ... etc.

Next, I needed to reliably mount and share it. Well, it mounts automatically just fine. But not in a way that would work for network sharing with any reliability. As usual, I found myself solving a problem I had already solved a couple of years back (but forgot about). It's necessary (or at least very helpful) to mount the USB drive by UUID, so that it always mounts in the same location -- because otherwise, it doesn't. Also, the install of the NFS server was a bit finicky. Plus also, defaults that didn't necessarily make sense to me.

Then I arrived at the next difficulty. My prior network shared drives have always been Windows drives. But, windows is not as picky about user privileges. Getting a nice read-write directory took some coaxing AFTER I got the share working. (I finally realized I needed to make a directory on the server that was set to the same user as on the client computer.)

But mostly, I want to memorialize this link (and I hope it doesn't disappear soon, as so many do): http://www.diwi.nl/node/50

I used this set of instructions before as well, but this time I didn't get as confused and everything went as planned.. So, I've got two laptops synching files to each other via my iFolders server.

(Worth keeping track of this link as well, for Apache/php/mySQL install: http://www.susegeek.com/internet-browser/install-configure-lamp-apachemysqlphp-in-opensuse-110/)

I would prefer "peer to peer" though -- I don't really need a dedicated server; and it seems that I cannot run an ifolder client on the ifolder server computer. Unfortunate, because there are things I would like to sync to that computer, such as some mysql databases.

The other issue I have is I have not been able to figure out what one does if the server drive dies. It's possible to run a backup on the server files -- but how would I set up a server that adopted existing files rather than doing a clean install? Don't know.

I also don't know how to re-do the install. In other words, a few weeks from now I will realize all the reasons I should have set things up differently. But, the last time I tried to remove and reinstall an iFolder installation, I ran into a train wreck. The uninstall leaves behind some files. Somewhere out there on the web are some instructions that explain what has to be killed off in addition to the uninstall process, but I don't want to reinvent that wheel again.

So, for awhile I will just run the sync system and see what happens. At a minimum, I am getting mirror copies of my working files on my two laptops. My last go-round I tried syncing configuration files, etc. -- but I found it a bit tricky to do, since these directories are outside the iFolder hierarchy. There is always the risk that I will totally bork both computers at the same time, which would be a fairly disasterous disaster. Perhaps I will restrain my curiosity for awhile.

Later: re-boot nightmare. Oddly, vhost-ssl.conf disappeared! Hope this does not happen every time I reboot...