id summary reporter owner description type status priority milestone component resolution keywords cc fix_version see_also 735 make a Dropbox installer geofft "This has absolutely nothing to do with Debathena other than people keep asking Athena support fora for it, so I figured we might as well have it in the Athena bug tracker and list the technical issues. There are two general approaches: one is to install it in a locker, and one is to modify the installer to work better on Athena and put that in a locker or on some website (which would restrict it to just being used on clusters or private workstations that you own). From the technical side of things, there are three gotchas: 1. Dropbox wants to put [ticket:248 sockets in your homedir], which doesn't work too well in AFS; for now you can work around that by making a symlink from ~/.dropbox to $ATHENA_SESSION_TMPDIR/dropbox or something. 2. The installer wants you to log out and log back in to install its Nautilus (file manager) hooks. You can bypass this by simply restarting Nautilus. 3. Everything is very likely to get confused if multiple copies of Dropbox are running on multiple machines backed against the same (networked) directory, since Dropbox is basically a networked filesystem of its own. So you likely want some sort of mutexing here. See the Firefox wrapper for inspiration, although everyone tends to ignore the resulting dialog, and I'm worried that Dropbox corruption might have worse effects than Firefox profile corruption. So something that can detect stale locks would be useful (e.g., can you query the servers for active clients, and tell if any of those are running on Athena?). It occurs to me that another option is just to have a dedicated Dropbox server that takes your Dropbox credentials and constantly runs a daemon against some subdirectory of your homedir that it has daemon.* bits on. This would avoid the multiple-client issues, and also keep your directories synced all the time so that e.g. if you put something in your local Dropbox checkout, it can show up in ~/www or ~/Public or ~/web_scripts immediately, even if you're not logged in to Athena. I'm not sure I like the burdens and security issues involved with running this service, though. Anyway, this would be a great thing to do at a SIPB hackathon or something." enhancement new normal The Distant Future -- hackathon