Joyent, Strongspace and my Samba Server
March 2nd, 2007
We use Joyent (affiliate link) for our mail (born out of Textdrive). Last weekend, the Joyfolks updated the application to a new version (and had quite a few problems in the process). One of the new features is Strongspace integration. Strongspace is a secure storage on the Net (accessible through SFTP, SCP and the like) that I have used for online backups for quite a while.
At first I didn’t think much of the integration, but then it dawned on me, that I could sync our companies shared folder (which lives on a Samba server) to Joyent to get access to all our data when not in the office. Turns out, that this is really easy to do:
The company share lives in /home/samba/company. I set up a cron job that sync the share every 15 minutes to the Joyent server:
0,15,30,45 * * * * rsync -azvCL --progress --delete /home/samba/company/ login@company.joyent.net@company.joyent.net:company/
This sync all changes from the Samba server to the Joyent server. Because rsync assumes that there is one master source for syncing, it doesn’t really support two-way syncing. Files that are added to the Joyent connector are deleted on the next rsync. I can live with that limitation for the moment.
In order to allow for syncing without passwords, I use ssh keys. My backup guide has details on how to do that. Because I sync from my server to the Joyent server, I created a key with an empty password and copied it to the .ssh directory on the Joyent connector.
Neat! And Joyent has just become much more usable. Now if they only would fix some of my peeves (like weeks starting on sunday instead of monday and the lack of a 24 hour clock) I’d be really happy.
Technorati Tags: joyent, rsync
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3 Comments Add your own
1. Arane Similant | March 5th, 2007 at 17:41
Why do the prices for strongspace storage keep going up ? I swear that six months ago it was $2/GB and now it is $3/GB ?
What is your effective price per GB when you have the integrated package like you do ?
I am leaning towards rsync.net for my offsite backups of my linux systems – originally because of their warrant canary but their price is looking better as well.
However they don’t serve any other ISP functions, so there is no integration of services like you are using at joyent… I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing…
Comments ?
2. Administrator | March 6th, 2007 at 10:15
True, the prices where different earlier. But now Strongspace is folded into the core services of Joyent, so you also get hosting and the connector.
I guess it really depends on your needs. If you can use hosting / connector, then Strongspace is a great deal.
I just browed rsync.net – and it looks quite good. Choice is a good thing :-)
3. Jason A. Hoffman | March 15th, 2007 at 06:19
We charge $1/GB/mo when more space is added. You can’t take the price of everything ($15) and simply divide it by the space (5GB), when that price includes more than storage.
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