Mount your Box.Net account using WebDAV

by Walter Rudametkin     linux   webdav   cloud  

It's pretty easy to setup box.net with webdav and to have your files automatically saved to box.net. I got 50gb of storage space on box.net when I bought an HP Touchpad 32gb on firesale.

However, because it's not a paid or professional account, I can't really do anything with it.

UPDATE: I don't use this setup because box.net is just too slow and some people have been complaining that they don't implement webdav properly. I really wish they'd come up with a client for Linux like Dropbox has.

Originally posted on Ubuntu Forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202761&page=4

Davfs setup

I just setup my box.net and wanted to share the steps with anybody having trouble. I suppose you've installed davfs already.

Create a mount point:

mkdir ~/box.net

Add this to /etc/fstab (correct the details for your user):

http://www.box.net/dav /home/user/box.net davfs rw,user,noauto 0 0

(Just as a note, https didn't work for me. It mounts but copied files never showed up. I saw something on their site about 256bit SSL encryption being available when you upgrade to business.)

To allow your your user to mount without being root you want to say yes to this:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure davfs2

Then add user to davfs2 group

sudo adduser $USER davfs2

Let's configure davfs in your home directory

mkdir ~/.davfs2
cp /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf ~/.davfs2

Add this to ~/.davfs2/davfs2.conf:

use_locks       0

To avoid typing your login and password every time:

sudo cp /etc/davfs2/secrets ~/.davfs2
sudo chown $USER ~/.davfs2/secrets

Add your login and pass to ~/.davfs2/secrets:

http://www.box.net/dav  username@mail.com   password

And finally mount:

mount ~/box.net

I hope I didn't miss anything. I used some stuff originally found in french here: http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/davfs2

Rsync and Box.net

I've been running rsync for a little while and ever since I got the configuration correct (i.e., nolocks, http) I haven't had any trouble.

On the other hand, I want better synchronization so instead of rsync (or even Unison) I'm thinking of using something like dvcs-autosync or SparkleShare because they use a git backend and provide version control (among other features), but I haven't figured out how to set it up so that I can put the "central" .git repo on my box.net. (Maybe it's really simple.) Also, lots of my files are photos & music and I'm not sure if using git on them is a good idea.

http://www.syncany.org/ might be an interesting option, they say they provide synchronization for local folders (including nfs and fuse mounts) out of the box, but the project doesn't seem very mature yet.