Creating Your own Dropbox esq Server using iFolder
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!!!