Rogue Wolves

I have been playing around with iFolder for several days now and until recently it's been a frustrating experience. As I pointed out in my last post I was able to get the iFolder server up and running after a few snags and it seems to be working well...but the client has been a complete pain in the a$$.

My plan was to install the client on both my Windows box and my OS X ibook. At first it looked like it was working great. I created a folder on my windows box and put a few files in it and it synchronized with the server. Then I watched as my ibook synchronized and the folder and files were pulled down to it. GREAT! However a few more experiments fell flat. I decided to try and add some files to that folder on my ibook and see what happens. Nothing! Hmm. So I forced a manual sync operation and still nothing. I restarted the client and this time it picked up the changes and sync'd successfully but came up with a wierd status message "1 item out of sync". After that nothing would synchronize anymore. To make a long story short I tried everything I could but could not get the OS X client to consistently synchronize files. So I decided to see how well the latest development build of the iFolder client would work: 3.5. It was an even worse situation. The client would not connect to the server no matter what I did. Next I decided to give the 3.4 build a go.

Now we are talking! It seems to be working. Files are synchronizing as expected.

Here are the versions of iFolder software I am currently using:

ifolder3 server: 3.5.6112.1-1
ifolder3 client: 3.4.6112.1

Here are some of my test cases to check that iFolder is working...

Now that my Fedora install is upgraded to FC4 I decided to give iFolder a shot. It's actually "fairly" easy to install, but I ran into a couple of snags trying to get it configured and running.

Installation on Fedora is simplest if you use Yum. To do this you need to add repositories for mono and iFolder. Here is a super fast way to get the repositories setup:

For Mono:

wget http://www.go-mono.com/download/fedora-4-i386/mono.repo
cp mono.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/

For iFolder:

wget http://forgeftp.novell.com/ifolder/server/3.5/iFolderServer-Fedora.repo
cp iFolderServer-Fedora.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/

Now the repositories are setup, you should execute yum upgrade to update your repository lists.

To install now is a piece of cake:

yum install ifolder3-server

Yum rules! If you are familiar with Apt-Get you will appreciate Yum. It will download and install all the dependencies...no messing around with tar balls for me!

So now iFolder is installed but it needs to be configured. I read through this wiki page to get some details on configuring iFolder...

I may have found a solution to my synch issue I posted previously.

iFolder looks promising. It basically meets most of my criteria. Here are some of the highlights:

• Cross-platform: runs on OSX, Windows, Linux, etc.
• Auto-syncs files to server and propagates to all client machines.
• Has a web-front end so you can access your files anywhere using a web-browser.
• Open Source!
• User/Group Security

From the iFolder website:

iFolder is a simple and secure storage solution that can increase your productivity by enabling you to back up, access and manage your personal files-from anywhere, at any time. Once you have installed iFolder, you simply save your files locally-as you have always done-and iFolder automatically updates the files on a network server and delivers them to the other machines you use.

Now it's just a matter of finding some free time to test it out and see how well it works...

I have a problem that I think is fairly common these days. I have several machines I work on day to day and several different sets of files scattered in the winds. I'll be working on one machine and realize a file I want to view is on a different machine. I try to manually tidy up my mess when I can but it's a losing battle. I end up doing what I think many others do...I end up emailing files to myself to transfer them from one machine to another (I don't own a flash drive and this is usually the fastest method). Emailing while a fairly ugly way to transfer files sometimes is the easiest way to do it. For my home machines I can copy over the network but for my office machine it's not as easy.

So.....

I have a server that I do use as a fileserver but I tend not to store all my files there because I don't always have access to it. I need to have offline access to my files.

What I'm thinking of for a solution:

I want to store all files on my home directory on my server BUT have each laptop have a working copy of that set of files. I want to be able to synchronize the filesystems so whatever machine I'm working on with have the latest set of files. Also would be nice to be able to access the file store on the server directly from any computer/platform with little setup for those times when I'm using a public terminal. Also I would like it to be secure and communications to be encrypted.

I want to be able to work on the files if I am disconnected from the network and I want files to sync back up with the server automatically when I reconnect to the network.

It's a lot to ask but this should be feasible...at least in part. I was thinking I might be able to use RSYNC for the synchronization... I was even considering CVS or Subversion but thought this might be overkill and could be cumbersome... I even thought of using tools that turn GMail into a filesystem but I would rather host the files myself and not trust someone else. I am after all talking about ALL my digital files.

Anyone have any thoughts on a good solution? Or any feedback on how they work around the problem?

I think if I figure something out this could be awesome...