IDisk

From LinodeWiki

The following is how to get your iDisk mounted on your Linode as an SSL-protected davfs mount - it will be treated like any other directory/mounted partition on your Linode. This was all done on a Debian 4.0 box, however the instructions should work for any distribution assuming that you replace the 'aptitude' commands with the appropriate distro-specific commands.

NOTE: This guide assumes that you will be installing DavFS2 1.3.0 or higher; if a lesser version is installed by the below command (check with dpkg --list | grep davfs), you may need to download and install davfs by hand - http://dav.sourceforge.net/)

Start by installing 'davfs2' and any dependencies with:

aptitude install davfs2

During the installation of davfs2, you will be given the option to leave a file SUID to allow non-root users to mount davfs filesystems defined in your /etc/fstab - the choice is yours (I am allowing it - I'll explain why later in this document).

Next, you'll want to create your /etc/fstab entry so that you don't need to type out a long 'mount' command every time you want to mount your iDisk. To prepare for this, create a directory somewhere on your disk that you'd like the have the iDisk mounted as - I use /home/MYUSERNAME/idisk because I mounted my personal iDisk and don't want it under /mnt (however if you are the only user of your machine or don't want this in your home directory, /mnt/idisk or /media/idisk can work just as well). Assuming that your mount point is /home/MYUSERNAME/idisk and your iDisk username is IDISKUSER, the /etc/fstab entry will look like this:

https://idisk.me.com/IDISKUSER /home/MYUSERNAME/idisk davfs user,rw,noauto 0 0

Notice that we are using https:// in the path of the iDisk to mount - this will encrypt all traffic between the Linode and the iDisk server via SSL.

If you chose earlier to allow non-root users to mount davfs filesystems, you will need to add any user that you want to do this to the davfs2 group that was created automatically during install - users that are not in this group will not be able to mount the iDisk. To do this (assuming that USERNAME is their username on the Linode), use:

usermod -a -G davfs2 USERNAME

Any user modified in such a way will need to log out and log back in to gain their new group permissions.

Now, it is simply a matter of mounting your iDisk. As 'root' or any user that is allowed to mount davfs through the above instructions (assuming that you used the /home/MYUSERNAME/idisk path in /etc/fstab), use:

mount /home/MYUSERNAME/idisk

You will be prompted for your iDisk username and password - your username is your iDisk username without the @mac.com/@me.com part. Once you have entered these, your iDisk will be mounted and can be used like any other mounted partition/filesystem/directory on your Linode! Be aware that using your iDisk in this way will use some of your monthly Linode bandwidth, and heavy usage could bring you over (you'll need to monitor this yourself), but you now have your iDisk mounted on your Linode and ready to use for backups or iDisk file access!

To unmount your iDisk, make sure that no users (including yourself) are in any sub-directories on the iDisk (you can simply type 'cd' to bring yourself back to your home directory), and then simply type:

umount /home/MYUSERNAME/idisk

Remounting the partition will require your iDisk username and password again, and simply uses the above mount /home/MYUSERNAME/idisk command.

I hope this helps some of the Linode Mac users get some fast backup space mounted in their Linode (may as well get as much use out of the MobileMe account as possible, right?)