Russ Greenwald

The Ascension of Balance

How do you measure your relationship? Do you view upon it like a photograph.  Is the lighting to your liking, shadows full of depth, interactions candid?  Do you treat it like a climb? Is achievement in summit, drive for difficulty, constant risk vs. assessment?

Mastery is in practice. Coltrane played his scales every night.  Stephen King never left his chair. The Beatles are estimated to have played over 10,000 hours before they became great.  Zen Buddhists might say to master without mastering, or learn without learning.  I doubt they would be totally opposed to a little advice.

Take lessons from Sir Issac Newton.  Push him  when he won’t budge, block

her when she can’t stop moving.  Take thought before acting, as there is always a reaction.  She is the sun, you are the planets, this is our universe, follow the axis.

Take lessons from me.  Never plan to leave on time, there is no right answer, yes that is a new outfit, and no it is nothing like the other one, keep working, practice is marriage.

What knowledge can be imparted on us from Mr and Mrs. Russell?  We’ve known Ann and Bayard longer than we have known each other, and known Anne plus Bayard almost as long as we’ve known our relationship.  Do we know them well? We know what we’ve observed.

Start by asking, are you similar or are you different?  Have you built a house for the other to make it a home?  Have you a gun rack to find it filled at Christmas?  Have one of you long curly hair and the other not.  Look not into the meaning, just observe.  Dream of simple desires and enjoy living simply.  Share your family, share your granite, share your felines, and share your grouse.

Never stop learning, never stop practicing, and study the greats.  We recommend the laws of “Anne and Bayard Russell”, and their definition of balance.

In this day and age of 3rd party cloud providers, we find ourselves allocating some of our most important resources to their network. This is a lot of trust! Some providers I trust more than others, depending on size, history, etc. Drop.io was a clear case of trust misused. That specific scenarion left me searching for a replacement service and a clouded ideal. Dropbox and Box.net are two providers that also hold some of our most dear data, all based on trust, money means nothing. What if there was a product that accomplished the same thing, but I owned the hardware, software, etc. Instead of putting this on my server, I’ll use a cloud that has proven my trust, EC2. Now I’ll become my own cloud provider.

How to build your own Dropbox, Box.net esq server using Novell’s iFolder

Step 1. Create an Amazon EC2 Account

Step 2. Go AMI’s, change viewing to All Images, and search for ami-bc57a1d5 You should see 960615132494/russgreenwald-ifolder-server

Step 3. Right Click and choose Launch Instance I use an m1.small, but feel free to use larger. Go through all the keypair creation. Choose a new security group and allow ports 22, 80, and 443 Launch

Step 4. Connect to the server using the keypair you created in step 3. If you go to Instances and right click on your new ifolder server, click connect and it will give you instructions. It should look something like ssh -i sysadmin-keypair.pem root@ec2-174-129-67-179.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Step 5. sudo -s to become root

Step 6. run “dpkg-reconfigure simias-server”

When it asks for your domain name, either enter the ec2-174-129-67-179.compute-1.amazonaws.com that relates to your server, or enter a FQDN i.e. ifolder.russgreenwald.com. If you do the later you will have to setup an elastic IP, associate it with your server, and configure an A record to that IP.

Time to Connect http://ifolder.domainname.com or http://ec2-174-129-67-179.compute-1.amazonaws.com /admin for the admin interface /ifolder for the web interface

Admin Here you can setup your users, sync intervals, file exclusions, etc. Default Admin username is admin password is ifolderadmin

ifolder clients Go http://ifolder.com/download/# and click on ifolder

Have Fun!!!