Monochrome Mentality

I seldom get excited about web services. I like YouTube and Flickr and all of those great services, but I've always hated relying on other people for data integrity. If Flickr goes under, my images are gone. If their servers go down, same thing.

"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself" pretty much describes my computing philosophy. So when I found a service two days ago that knocked my socks off, it's a pretty "big" thing to me.

Let me first explain my need. I like creativity for the sake of creativity, but to be really exciting, something has to solve a problem I have.

I'm in a state of flux right now in how I view and use computers. The first computer I had purchased myself was a laptop which had a ton of problems. Because of those problems (namely, overheating and immediate power down) I essentially swore off laptops. Mobility was over-rated.



That philosophy guided my computing habits. I've been tethered to a desktop ever since. The systems have changed but the form factor hadn't.

When Openmoko's Neo products came out, I liked the idea of a Free Software powered phone, so I bought it. Having a tiny little computer to hack on began introducing me to new things. Rather than burning MP3 CD's for my Element, I downloaded podcasts and played them from the Neo. I began storing images on it and notes, video. In short, mobility became slightly less over-rated.

With the mobility bug still kicked in, and my current desktop coming on the year-and-a-half mark (still not a bad PC, Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM, almost 2 TB of disk space and a decent nVidia card) I've decided it's time to move on. The mobility bug kept biting though.

My decision to move on resulted in me deciding to purchase two netbooks and I've settled on the Acer Aspire One. My wife had been impressing upon me the desire for a laptop so she can play games in her comfortable chair. Another very real reason is that my apartment, while not small, is too small for the stuff we have. I've got these massive industrial tables my computer sites on, and eliminating those would free up a lot of space in my room and the same is true of my wife's room. My ever expanding brewery is a space hog.

We're going mobile. To make the transition more difficult, my wife has requested that her netbook be a Windows XP system for various reasons (biggest being work's high dependence on Windows). The way our desktops are set up right now has NFS shares of music, pictures and movies so that they're network transparent. This is important. My wife shouldn't have to do anything special to access and use her files. NFS allows this.

But how do you share files transparently between Windows and Linux? Samba sucks. Some people hold it up as a bastion of greatness, but it's always sucked in my experience. I don't particularly blame Samba either, I'm sure it's the Windows networking that actually sucks. Additionally, the home file server which contains all of this music is behind a rather slow (I work with GigE bandwidth, so a 3 meg connection is quite slow in my eyes) DSL connection which simply doesn't cut it for NFS shares. Add to this that NFS is insecure by itself, that NFS tunneling over ssh is not "transparent" for Windows and my file server becomes essentially useless for "the mobile world". What I need is a way to give myself and my wife access to our files anywhere we go, make that access transparent for her and ensure it works on Linux and Windows.

I found such a solution. It's Dropbox.

Dropbox is a service that offers 2GB of file storage and syncing for free. You can upgrade to 50GB for $9.99 a month or $99 a year. There are clients for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Specifically for the Linux side, it's a Nautilus plug-in and userspace daemon. The basic idea behind the service is that all files in your dropbox directory are copied onto Dropbox's servers. Drop files into that directory and the changes are synced automatically. You're given access to your files on any computer running the Dropbox application as well as on any browser that handles sessions (which is all modern browsers) through their web panel.

Changes to your folder are pushed to any computer also running Dropbox and configured for your account. Here at work, I've got the newly installed Dropbox running and I now have access to some of my music and images just as transparently as the NFS/Samba server over yonder.

It's a bit nicer than a convoluted rsync setup. Only changes are pushed, limiting bandwidth consumption to their servers and to clients awaiting sync. To make it even more special, on the Dropbox forums it's pretty clear that each file is also hashed and if you're attempting to upload a file with a matching hash, the file is just copied server-side rather than uploaded. In this specific case, someone was trying to upload an Ubuntu ISO and to sync took about three seconds to be in his account and usable.

What Dropbox does for our mobile situation is allows both my wife and I to access our music transparently. I tend to download new music and ensure it's properly tagged, so new music and changes are then pushed to her. If she wants to blacklist songs, she can, and if a co-worker gives her a new song, it can be given to me to "process" without much shuffling. Because it's internet based, it's accessible anywhere and not dependent on my slow home DSL.

I've also suggested it here at work. We currently use GoDaddy's FileVault to co-ordinate with the designers who work from home. One of the issues we've had with that is integration. While it works with Internet Explorer, it's quite unusable with Firefox. Dropbox could solve this problem, allowing our company to share the files we use with our out-of-office employees regardless of the platform they're using. It would allow all the people to get instant updates (like when I hack on some of our internal web apps, for instance, and bump the version.) without even thinking. It's currently in evaluation here, hopefully it will take.

Dropbox provides binary packages for Fedora and Ubuntu, as well as source repositories for theoretical use on any Debian-based distro that can meet it's dependencies. Binaries exist for Ubuntu Gutsy and Hardy, both AMD64 and i386 and there is also a source tarball, though I'm not sure how well it works with other distros.

I'm quite thrilled with this, and as long as there aren't hangups between now and when I purchase my netbooks, they'll have made a missionary customer out of me.

Now all I need is a reliable, high-speed mobile internet connection and I'll be all set. I love how people are innovating and can meet my needs!