Category: articles


Secure your Dropbox on Mac and Linux

February 11th, 2011 — 10:23 pm

Ever thought it might be worth encrypting your Dropbox, but were held back because it’s just too much work? I know I was. But not anymore – welcome to this 5 step guide to a secure Dropbox. It only takes a few minutes of work – compile time excluded.

This guide will use encfs, which uses business proof AES or Blowfish algorithms. Most importantly, it has a major benefit over other available encryption mechanisms – it operates on blocks. It doesn’t hide an entire encrypted volume in a single file. This approach doesn’t work well with Dropbox, because once the user changes only one file the whole Dropbox will be synchronized.

  1. Install MacFuse.
  2. Install encfs. If you have Homebrew, this is as easy as:

    $ sudo brew install encfs

  3. Delete your files from Dropbox. After deleting them, make sure to go to the webapp, hit ‘Show Deleted Files’ and delete each file/folder permanently.
  4. Now comes the fun part. Set up your encrypted Dropbox:

    $ encfs ~/DropboxEncrypted ~/Dropbox

    Enter ‘y’ to create the folder DropboxEncrypted, enter ‘p’ for Paranoia mode and chose a password.

  5. You’re done. ~/Dropbox will show your files just fine, but when you take a look at them on the webapp, you will see them encrypted.

After a reboot, the userspace mount of ~/Dropbox will be lost. Repeat step 4 to mount it again. If you ever want to unmount yourself, just umount it. This process can be automated with encfsvault.

Linux users, don’t worry – I didn’t forget you. Switch MacFuse with fuse and encfsvault with pam-mount. You’re a Linux user, you will manage.

Update for Lion users:
Don’t use MacFuse, it’s obsolete. Just install fuse4x and fuse4x-kext, then encfs – all via homebrew.

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Some GForge automation

December 7th, 2010 — 04:06 pm
There is no automated way of moving tracker items in GForge. Each item has to be moved by hand. I just wrote an iMacros script to automate this task, which has saved me and a friend a whole day of clicking repetitively.

You can find this script on github: https://github.com/preek/gforge-mass-move-tracker-items

Why we needed this: When you implement a new custom workflow in a legacy GForge environment, it is best to do so in a template. Every new project can then be cloned from it.

Unfortunately old projects will not get updated. You have two choices now: One is to repeat enforcing the workflow on every project (which is a tedious task and can easily take up to a day). The other is to make a new tracker which is cloned from the template. Then you can move your tracker items from the old tracker to the new one. Voila, you got the new workflow rules applied.

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Getting rid of a Ubuntu resource hog

November 17th, 2010 — 11:03 am

While graphical package managers like Synaptic or KPackageKit certainly are great tools for the novice Ubuntu user, I personally don’t see any benefit against the various apt CLI bindings. For one, I’m not a big fan of using GUIs where not needed and secondly, the graphical package managers’ search features come with extra baggage – they use Xapian in a cron job for indexing, which can be quite a CPU hog.

Even though Ubuntu has good defaults and uses ionice to schedule for IO priority, this setup caused my system to hang completely. To be fair, I should mention that I run VirtualBox instances in parallel.

To disable the regular indexing, you can remove execute permission on the cron job:

sudo chmod 644 /etc/cron.weekly/apt-xapian-index

Or you can completely uninstall the tools:

sudo aptitude purge apt-xapian-index

You can also uninstall KPackageKit or Synaptic completely, but you would lose your update manager reminding you of new packages.

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