Dropbox on FreeBSD

I put my personal websites on a FreeBSD server. One of my websites is a photo album, which I want to read the content from a Dropbox. That Dropbox primarily runs on Mac, iPhone and iPad. I was trying to explore the possibilities to set up a Dropbox on FreeBSD. Since Dropbox doesn’t support FreeBSD officially, I need to use 3rd party tools, most of them are basically based on the Dropbox developer API.

So I have tried several 3rd party tools, as you expect, none of them works. The primary problem is the synchronization, i.e., if my wife adds or deletes a photo on the Dropbox, I expect that the Dropbox folder on FreeBSD will get updated as well. Another problem is the speed. Looks like the Dropbox API is not as fast comparing to its own native application. On the same network, it took few hours to download the content (around 1GB of jpeg files) from Dropbox on FreeBSD, versus 10 minutes on a Mac/Windows/Linux machine using the native application.

So I came up few alternative solutions:

  1. Hosting my website on CentOS Linux. Since Dropbox supports Linux, I can easily read the Dropbox without any problem.
  2. Push the Dropbox content from Mac/Linux to FreeBSD using Rsync periodically (e.g., every 5 mins, hourly etc). That way FreeBSD will have access the Dropbox files.
  3. Set up a NFS service on a Linux box with access to Dropbox, and let the FreeBSD to mount the corresponding NFS share. This solution is okay if both machines are on the same network. It may raise some security concerns if both machines are connected via the public.

Another solution I think it may work is to install the Dropbox native application on FreeBSD. FreeBSD supports running Linux application via Linux emulation. Back in the old days (FreeBSD 8), it was pretty easy to include the Linux support on FreeBSD (one click in the sysinstall). Since the recent releases, they’ve made it harder because not many people wants to run Linux binary on FreeBSD. Based on my previous experience, I think it should work on the latest FreeBSD, but it may require some works.

Another crazy idea will be running Dropbox with Wine on FreeBSD. But this goes way too far from my original purpose, and I am not a big fan of Wine because it adds too many libraries to the system.

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