On The Fence Development

In my previous couple of posts I've been configuring Dropbox on my Virtual Private server running a headless installation of Ubuntu 10.04. The main reason for this was to enable me to use it for storing backups without having to rely in the Dropbox Web API which has proven to be somewhat flaky - or at least that's my experience. With the Dropbox daemon now installed, configured and running all I need now is a script to perform the actual backups and save in the appropriate location.

In Part 1 I clarified a few points on the Dropbox tutorial for getting the server running on a headless Linux server and while I had it running it was 'locked' to an ssh session, i.e. close the session and the Dropbox server also stopped. The same tutorial provides links to sample init.d files which can be used to start the Dropbox server on boot. This works well enough but there were a couple of things that, again, could have done with a bit more detail.

If you've been reading any of my recent posts you will know that I have been moving from a shared server host to a virtual private server and that I have also experienced issues with my backups. Well with the blog configured and running well the migration was almost complete, but what about backing up my data?

The answer is of course, when you can't restore from it. This is the situation I found myself in last weekend after receiving an email from a friend saying that he tried to post a comment but only received a blank page for his efforts. Sure enough, when I tried I got the same result.

For the past few years I've been using Amazon S3 for my remote file storage needs, initially it was used for a site I created blog-type in DotNetNuke for my girlfriends daughter to use on her Gap Year trip around the world. The hosting I had at the time was quite expensive in terms of disk space so the low cost of the Amazon service made it an easy choice.

When it comes to upgrading Operating Systems I'm not known as an early adopter, I normally wait a while for others to have the headache of encountering and resolving problems. However, in a moment of madness I decided to upgrade my fully functional Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) installation to 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).