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...

To test out iFolder I had to upgrade my Fedora Linux install to FC4. I contemplated FC5 but read somewhere about an issue with iFolder and FC5 so I decided against it. Best not to leap frog from FC3 to FC5 anyways...baby steps.

Rather than clean install or download the installer CD and attempt an upgrade I decided to tempt fate and see how well a live update using Yum would work. Note: first I backed up everything. I may be adventurous but I'm not crazy. This upgrade path is not recommended by the Fedora Project, however many people have had good success with it.

Key points:

• Disable third party repositories first
• Backup everything important!
• Make note of any third party software you may have installed (it may be broken after the upgrade)
• Disable SELinux and reboot
• Some config files may have changed. The upgrade will not overwrite your existing config files but will create a version with a .rpmnew extension so you can merge the changes into your existing config.
• FC3 uses PHP 4 and FC4 uses PHP 5 so you will have to update your php.ini file after the upgrade. You pretty much can just mv php.ini php.ini.bak and mv php.ini.rpmnew php.ini to get it working.

This is a quick list of steps on what to do.  For more information on what's going on etc, read through the links at the bottom.  Particularly if you have a 64 bit system, there are some additional steps that I omitted here.

Step 1: yum -y update yum
Step 2: wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-4-2.noarch.rpm
Step 3: rpm -Uvh /path/to/fedora-release-4-2.noarch.rpm
Step 4: Disable third party repositories. I just renamed them from .repo to .bak
Step 5: yum -y upgrade mkinitrd
Step 6: yum -y update kernel
Step 7: Disable SELinux: nano /etc/sysconfig/selinux and set SELINUX=disabled
Step 8: Reboot and load FC4 Kernel
Step 9: yum remove kernel-2.6.\*FC3\* and yum remove kernel-smp\*FC3\*
Step 10: yum -y upgrade
Step 11: Go get a coffee this will take some time...
Step 12: yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Environment"
Step 13: Re-enable SELinux if you use it
Step 14: Reboot
Step 15: Look over system logs and see if any problems occurred at bootup.
Step 16: Re-enable third party repositories and perform yum update

I didn't come up with this whole step process. I used the following two resources to come up with a strategy:

YumUpgradeFaq

Upgrading Red Hat Linux with Yum

So far it's been a big success. My only snag was php being broken, but after updating my php.ini file it worked fine. Now I should be able to give iFolder a go and see how well it works...

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...