UPDATE: Thanks to Ryan, Ant and Fern for the tips. With that in mind I found an online Slicehost tutorial that contained the steps and explained how to install ruby via apt-get, then get the latest rubygems, install that manually, ran gem to update itself, then run gem to install rails – as suggested. The steps I took from that page:
UPDATE #4 It’s 2012, and this project is still alive, although I haven’t worked on lipsync as much as I should. I want to, and have new ideas to implement and try out in the next few months. The two way sharing is a bit hacky, and I don’t like it, the installer creates a cronjob: that checks for server changes to sync back every minute – and it tries to avoid conflicts by not running if a sync the other way is happening. Yes, if you’re using 2 computers at once it could get confused, but so far, it’s pretty good – but something I want to improve. I’m also very interested in ownCloud and using remote storage auth protocol like Unhosted proposes – these are two things I’d love to integrate into lipsync over the next few months. I really think having something that is all owned by the user, and in full control of the user, is still the ultimate way. Watch the lipsync.it site for more details, thanks.
UPDATE #3: Ok, a long, overdue update on this project. I’ve worked on the next version of this ideal that I encourage everyone to checkout and try for themselves. You can get it on Github, and the project’s name is lipsync. My goal is to make something that is trivial for anyone to setup and use, providing them a ‘Dropbox-like’ experience. As before I’ve focused on the backend, server side, part of the game to get that working, but would be happy to work with anyone that wanted to work on a GUI, or integrate this with existing projects, such as Sparkleshare, which seems to have a great GUI, but a backend that relies on things like Github for storage. So give it a look and remember, the more feedback the better; and as always don’t worry about offending me! Thanks.
UPDATE #2: There was a big influx of new hits/posts on this article last week thanks to Lifehacker Australia linking to it, plus they even came up with a pretty sweet logo. It’s very cool that so many are (still) interested in this project – and that’s what it has become; a project. I’ll be releasing code to setup a complete command-line Dropbox like implementation on Linux in about a week. Code will be hosted on github.com and I’m hoping it will spur others to work on cross platform front-ends to talk to it. So far the technology is there, I’m just using what others have built, it’s just a matter of hooking it all up! After all, why reinvent the wheel? (not that I could 
) Thanks again for all the comments and support!
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this, and the Reddit thread, as it has provided some great ideas building off of my concept. I’m starting to rethink about how we could have version control on top of things, and I’ll update things when I have more to share. Also, does anyone have iFolder (thanks for the proper link salubrium) working? It looks like you need SUSE Linux, which I don’t have access to, plus I know most Novell projects need a *ton* of Mono dependencies installed to have any of their stuff working, at least on the server side; but it sounds like they have Mac, Linux and Windows clients, which is encouraging. While for my needs something a bit more ‘close to the bone’ (as below) might be better for the server side, having it be inter-operable with something like iFolder could provide a lot more functionality for others.
First off, if you haven’t tried Dropbox, you should check it out; sync all of your computers via the Dropbox servers, their basic free service gives you 2Gigs of space and works cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux). I use it daily at home and work, and just having a live backup of my main data for my work workstation, my home netbook, and any other computer I need to login to is a huge win. Plus, I have various ‘shared’ folders that distribute certain data to certain users that I’ve granted access to, this means work details can be updated and automatically distributed to the folks I want to review/use the data. I recommend everyone try it out, and see how useful it is, it’s turned into a game changer for me. So a few months ago they made headlines on supporting Linux as they released the client as open source. While this got hopes up for many, it was only the client that was open source, the server is still proprietary. While slightly disappointing, this is fine, they’re a company trying to make money. I don’t fault them for this, it’s just that a free, portable service like that would be a killer app.
nginx
So back in January I had a post about HOWTO: log the user’s IP, not the proxy’s, in Lighttpd access log, but today I switched that system to run nginx (actually nginx has been running since early this year, I just got lazy on running Varnish) fronted again by Varnish. I had the same issue, but not much trouble solving it. Since I often refer to my own notes on fak3r, I’m recording it here for myself, and anyone streaming in from Google. So, as I talked about before, when you run a webserver behind Varnish doing http acceleration, the webserver access logs will display the IP of the proxy (generally 127.0.0.1) instead of the end user’s IP. This not only breaks any kind of tracking or reporting you want to run against your webserver logs. Since this server runs Varnish in front of nginx, and it reveals the end user’s IP in the header as X-Forwarded-For, so it’s just a matter of making nginx use that variable in its access logs instead of the default variable defining the referring IP. Once we know that, the configuration is simple. Edit your nginx.conf file:
In the early days of this blog I used to run it on Typo, which *was* a great Ruby on Rails blogging platform (at one time). Unfortunately the project stalled (for years) and I ended up jumping ship after a few months of bugs and the ever crashing Rails server, WEBrick. Yes, if you search Netcraft you could see that was my *exposed* server at the time…not good! Now if you look, Typo is still kicking, and it *may* be a solid platform now, I hope it is, as I even contributed a ton of the achieved themes that live on in the ‘Theme Garden’ there. But on I moved into the world of MySQL/PHP front end sites via great apps like Drupal and WordPress, fast forward, Ruby on Rails is a mature platform now, and I am evaluating webapps at work, so I needed to install Rails on Debian GNU/Linux (but of course these directions would work just as well in Ubuntu Linux. It’s amazing simple, I took some steps from the Ruby on Rails wiki, first install the dependencies for good measure:
I’m a big Bash fan, I know Perl is the more popular scripting language, and I’m slowly using it more, but hey, if I need something done, I can do it quicker in Bash (keeping in mind that I’m a systems guy, not a dev guy). While at work looking up Bash related syntax I came across a page describing how to run a webserver with 100 lines of Bash. It uses the old school GNU utility Netcat (nc) for communication between the pipes, and just a ton of basic logic and functions to pass it on to the user. It’s one of those things I look at and can’t believe it works, but it does. Of course security is unknown, as is the original author, but I consider this a reference on how to do networking things in Bash; who knows what I’ll use (parts) of it for. If anyone has details on who originally wrote this I’m all ears.[sourcecode language='xml']#!/bin/bash
Home