Re: [tlug] Dropbox Linux Client free))

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2019-06-09 09:22 +0100 (Sun), Darren Cook wrote:

> The other reason I don't use that set up on subsequent machines was a
> discovery when I had a senior moment and forgot my user password. I knew
> the disk key and got back in as root, set a new user password... and had
> no home directory, as the (old) user password was also the decrypt key.

Once of the nice things to remember about LUKS is that it allows you
to have up to eight different passpharses to decrypt the disk
encryption key. Typically when rotating a passphrase I leave some
variant of the old one in place for a bit so I can use that if I
forget the new one. On some systems I also have an "emergency
passphrase" that's unmemorizable but written down somewhere to unlock
the disk if I brain-fart the memorized one.

> > So it is quite possibly reasonable for you just to turn off
> > this feature.
> 
> I think I need 490GB free disk space to do that (?), and I only have
> 10GB. As Dropbox client is the only thing that complains, complaining
> about Dropbox has been the easiest "fix".

I would think that the only free space you should need to to turn it
off is the same amount of space as is in your homedir, so that it can
make an encrypted copy of that before deleting the encrypted copy. But
I have never disabled this feature after enabling it, so I could be
utterly wrong.

If that is the case, though, and you have a half GB of stuff in your
home dir and only 10 GB free, you could simply move most of that data
off to another drive temporarily, shrinking your home dir enough to
decrypt it.

Another solution that doesn't involve changing your homedir at all is
simply to keep your Dropbox directory outside of it. I've had success
with:

    dropbox stop
    mv ~/Dropbox /u/cjs/Dropbox
    ln -s /u/cjs/Dropbox ~/Dropbox
    dropbox start

If that doesn't work (because perhaps Drobpox is doing something silly
like checking the filesystem type of ~/Dropbox instead of the
directory it points to) you can simply run Drobpox with an
appropriately modified $HOME environment variable; I do this on the
drive where I keep a full backup of my entire Drobpox so that I can
use it on a host where I also have a partial sync in my home dir. It's
kind of a hack, I guess. I wonder if Dockerizing it would help.

cjs
-- 
Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch