ownCloud is a very good self hosted solution to host all your contacts, photos, documents etc. Now, ownCloud does provide its own file sync application, but I believe using BitTorrent Sync is much better solution to keep your files in sync between your local machine and your ownCloud installation.
This post won’t cover installation of ownCloud, or BitTorrent Sync (see my post here for BTSync setup) and shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes!
BitTorrent Sync was released last month and I’ve been playing around with it for the last couple of days. I currently have it syncing data between OwnCloud and my personal machine, effectively creating my own fully fledged DropBox replacement (more on that in another post!).
Today I am going to cover installing BitTorrent Sync into your copy of Debian (I am using Raspbian on my RasPi), so that when you restart the machine, it starts up with you. Hit the jump for the detailed instructions!
If you are a regular user of a public Wi-Fi access point and have a Raspberry Pi being used as a web server, you can secure your connection in these areas using SSH.
First of all, you need to have your Raspberry Pi (or any server with SSH installed) running and accessible from the outside world (I’m not going to guide this, there is plenty of help on google if you want to get this running). A basic installation will have this.
Next, go to http://chetansurpur.com/projects/sidestep/ and download the application (and check out the rest of Chetan Surpur’s website, its pretty good!). When this is installed, follow the steps and your away.
When ever you are on a public wifi, click connect!
Sidestep.
On the debian based OS’s (Raspbmc / Raspbian), if you run the device headless most of the time you can ensure the HDMI port is powered off by editing /etc/rc.local and adding the below line above exit 0:
/opt/vc/bin/tvservice -o
(notice its the same line that I posted in the script to turn XBMC off and on in Raspbmc).
Reboot and done. Not sure how much you gain from this but its a nice little trick.
[FAIL] Starting MySQL database server: mysqld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . failed!
After stripping out MySQL completely, then PHP, and reinstalling still doesn’t work – WTF.
Next step – rebuild the machine – fresh install of Raspbmc might be nice!
Why would you want to do this?
I use my RPi for XBMC and as a web server (yet to reinstall after switching to Raspbmc). I do not always want XBMC running, as I am not always home and also not always watching films! So in the interests of saving system resources I wanted to stop XBMC and shut off the HDMI to stop any TV interference. There are two commands to do this, but they are quite long and not easy to remember! I needed something to shorten this process. Preferably xbmc start/stop.
This is how I implemented it.
I only have one decent sized SD card for use with my Raspberry Pi, a 32GB Sandisk SDHC card. I recently started looking at Raspbmc for XBMC use (as the installation looks better than installing XBMC on top of Raspbian).
As such, I googled it. Found it on stackexchange and an subsequently reposting what I have found, in a hopefully easier to read way.