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How to Configure Dropbox with Hostmonster

25 May 2011

How to guide

First thing you'll need to do is get SSH access to Hostmonster or your favorite Linux host.

From dropbox:

Step-by-step version

Log in to your Linux server so you obtain a shell prompt, and change to your home directory.
cd
a. Stable 32-bit: (I installed the 32bit version, Hostmonster's default account)

wget -O dropbox.tar.gz "http://www.dropbox.com/download/?plat=lnx.x86"   

Stable 64-bit:

wget -O dropbox.tar.gz "http://www.dropbox.com/download/?plat=lnx.x86_64"   

Sanity check to make sure we're not going to clog our home directory.

tar -tzf dropbox.tar.gz   

Extract

tar -xvzf dropbox.tar.gz

Make sure the LANG environment variable is set to something other than NULL, e.g. en_US.iso88591.
If it is NULL, you'll get a cryptic error. (mine was NULL and it worked)

Run dropboxd:

~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd   

You should see output like this:
This client is not linked to any account... Please visit

https://www.dropbox.com/cli_link?host_id=7d44a557aa58f285f2da0x67334d02c1 to link this machine.
Dropbox will create a ~/Dropbox folder and start synchronizing it after this step!
Go to the URL given; you should see a success message at the top of your screen.

From FuzedBulb's comment on dropbox's forum:

If you've the text based ".dropbox-distro" folder with you, you can try doing:

$ nohup ./.dropbox-dist/dropboxd &

If HostMonster doesn't disallow background tasks, this will keep the daemon running in the background even when you have logged out from shell.

After this I symbolic linked my public directory under public_html.

cd to public_html
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Public DropboxPublic

It's still copying information over but the dropbox daemon did stop at one point. I'll have to look into what may have caused it, any suggestions appreciated.