RackSpace Cloud Files and Ubuntu

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Reviewing the Options

RackSpace Cloud Files provide a cheap storage solution for private and public files.  While the web interface provided by RackSpace is good it is limited to file uploads and downloads and does not have basic facilities such synchronisation  and backup.  One key point to note is that while I have not investigated fully the containers used by RackSpace they do not appear to naturally allow for conventional directory trees and any backup and synchronisation. However, I was still interested in providing a means of easily uploading and downloading files through the Ubuntu file system.

Initially I looked at the python scripts which are maintained by Rackspace for developers wishing to develop applications which link to RackSpace Cloud Files.  Older versions of these scripts are directly installable from the Ubuntu repositories with newer versions avaialble from https://github.com/redbo/cloudfuse.   If you decide to use these tools and you are using the London based RackSpace servers then it is important to read the manual pages at http://packages.python.org/python-cloudfiles/  as the london servers have a different authorisation url.

Cloudfuse

The Python CloudFile scripts do not provide an easy way forward for synchronising files.  Cloudfuse, however, offers integration with Nautilus and, therefore, the possibility of using a range of backup and synchronisation applications.   Cloudfuse is available from https://github.com/redbo/cloudfuse and from here.  The current version (Feb 2011) intially does not appear to support the UK based version of RackSpace Cloud Files, however, it is possible to make the necessary adjustment in the hidden file containing your login details ($HOME/.cloudfuse).  The .cloudfuse file should be in this format.

        username=[username]
        api_key=[api key]
        authurl=https://lon.auth.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0

It should be noted that the user name, API key and the authurl should not be surrounded by any quotation characters and it would also appear that there should be no spaces after the equals sign.  Cloudfuse has certain dependencies ~ libcurl, fuse and libxml2 and the development version of libxml2.  The dependencies should be loaded before running using:

	apt-get install build-essential libcurl4-openssl-dev libxml2-dev libssl-dev libfuse-dev

....then compile cloudfuse within the folder containing the downloaded file


	./configure

	make
	sudo make install

BUGS/SHORTCOMINGS as :

• Doesn't implement rename().  There's no good way to do this with the Cloud Files API.  Unfortunately, this makes cloudfuse considerably less useful in Finder, as it expects to be able to rename a lot.
• When reading and writing files, it buffers them in a local temp file.
• It keeps an in-memory cache of the directory structure, so it may not be usable for large file systems.  Also, files added by other applications will not show up until the cache expires.
• The root directory can only contain directories, as these are mapped to containers in cloudfiles.
• Directory entries are created as empty files with the content-type "application/directory".
• Cloud Files limits container and object listings to 10,000 items cloudfuse won't list more than this number of directories/files.

CloudFilesLink

This is a simple GUI front end to Cloudfuse with the added option of unmounting the volume.  Since it is based on Cloudfuse it has the same limitations as Cloudfuse (see above).  To download the file click on the button  below.  You may also wish to use the icon by right -clicking and saving to your local disk.  CloudFilesLink is supplied under the GPL licence without  any warranty whatsoever.