Tryouts: XulRunner Data Grab

So, I've got this hunk of data little over 1GB that I'm pretty sure is going to be essential to my business. It's not the 1GB size, or even the particular data that I'm working with, but the fact that I need access to it, at whatever machine I'm using today.

We've got two users on the same machine collaborating on that data using Unison File Sync. How's it going? One user wants to use Subversion, the other wants to use Git. Integration is a pain that we don't want to tackle now. So, we're giving each user their own copy of the data, with their own exclusive write permissions on that copy, and they can share that data with anyone. They're going to share passwords, or they're going to share a third-party data store on another machine, and it's going to handle the access control rights between these two folks.

Unison supports most popular file transfer mechanisms. Our hunk is exported via FTP to Kingdon's own location on the house machine, /export/ftp/home/kingdon, which is encapsulated in a chroot jail so FTP users can't get out without connecting by another protocol. The firewall is responsible for making sure that only appropriate users will access the machine by any protocol, either FTP, SSH, IMAP, so there are actually plenty of different ways in, but this port's VSFTPD process is restricted to data inside of /export/ftp because it was executed inside of a chroot jail.

The firewall isn't doing its job reliably. The first firewall gets its IP address from the cable modem, doles out a static IP on a private subnet to the second firewall, which assigns a static IP to the house machine on a second private subnet, exposes the whole internal network to anyone with an 802.11 wireless client device that knows how to read, and forwards port 21:FTP past both firewalls to the house machine, so users on the outside with a username and password can access FTP and that big storage area with about 120GB of space on /export/ftp

kpb1363@hilly:~/spring2006$ ftp house.tuesdaystudios.com
ftp: connect: Connection timed out

Bummer. Try again tomorrow? I'll look at the firewall and figure out what's up when I get home.

Ruby on Rails: http://getontracks.org/downloads/index

Tracks has a new version out! I'm going to deploy it on my ArchLinux host, currently represented by irie-arch.tuesdaystudios.com, and I wanted to put up a page there that describes the services exposed, including pricing info, in case someone asks for their own copy from me. Maybe I'll use Instiki for this.

Meet our customer and his ad-hoc server farm (two machines in one) that live in Rochester on a University network, with a nearby home-based backup server for super cheap.