I have been playing around with the very impressive Dropbox, watching the surprisingly rapid syncing between my desktop and netbook, when I stumbled on a use case that would totally rock my socks off: I totally need a Dropbox on my Linode!

So I copied ~/.dropbox* up to my Linode VM server, checked if it had any obvious references to the machine it was originally installed on, and ran ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd (a quick ldd will show you that it is a simple daemon, and doesn’t link to any of the GUI stuff).

Voila — Dropbox on my server, synced back with my desktop and netbook, with the same delightful performance and seamless attention to detail as the desktop client. Seriously, their GNOME-like “Just Works” approach and Nautilus integration are totally awesome.

(I also posted to their forum about it, so there might be some discussion there to watch.)

Bravo, Dropboxers.

Update: In the forum, Walther points out that you can use the same computer to register two nodes with different names (using the GUI), so the Dropbox central server knows you have two different nodes connected. Great tip, particularly given that it might avoid problems in the future.