Dropbox - glibc and file systems support

General support questions
swallowtail
Posts: 112
Joined: 2009/04/18 04:48:27

Dropbox - glibc and file systems support

Post by swallowtail » 2018/08/24 00:18:42

Dropbox are dropping support in their Linux sync app for glibc < 2.19 effective October 15 (less than 2 months!), and will only support ext4 on Linux from November 7th.

What are other Dropbox users' plans to work around this? I currently have 950GB stored in Dropbox, with nightly backups from multiple Linux clients, on both C7 and C6. The ext4 is less of an issue than the glibc challenge...

Thoughts from the community?

jackson555
Posts: 1
Joined: 2018/08/28 10:15:09

Re: Dropbox - glibc and file systems support

Post by jackson555 » 2018/08/28 10:20:26

RHEL6 here, but same boat...

It was suggested to me (by one of our server chaps) to try LD_PRELOAD, viz.

LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/my/newerglibc.[so?] /usr/bin/dropbox

(not quite right, but you see what I mean). That means finding a 2.19+ glibc rpm or building from source. No luck finding the RPM (thought there might be a centos one easily found, but not in a couple of minutes looking); building from source scares me too much today!

Does that sound possible? I've used LD_PRELOAD for simpler issues (where the binary I wanted to run would only look for an old version of some library), but am not confident it'll work for glibc, being a much more complex (I presume) library.

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TrevorH
Site Admin
Posts: 33202
Joined: 2009/09/24 10:40:56
Location: Brighton, UK

Re: Dropbox - glibc and file systems support

Post by TrevorH » 2018/08/28 12:02:31

SpiderOak works on CentOS 7, not tried it on el6.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

pgreco
Posts: 31
Joined: 2018/04/14 17:23:02

Re: Dropbox - glibc and file systems support

Post by pgreco » 2018/08/29 23:20:22

It all depends on how they actually check for the glibc version.
Here's something I used to preload for chrome, so I didn't have that "unsupported" bar

Code: Select all

const char *gnu_get_libc_version (void)
{
	return "2.17";
}
Really hoping that Dropbox does it the same way :lol:

jamespo
Posts: 1
Joined: 2018/08/30 09:42:57

Re: Dropbox - glibc and file systems support

Post by jamespo » 2018/08/30 09:53:50

You can run Dropbox containerized in Docker, I've just changed a Centos 6 machine to work like this.

https://www.webscalability.com/blog/201 ... for-linux/

swallowtail
Posts: 112
Joined: 2009/04/18 04:48:27

Re: Dropbox - glibc and file systems support

Post by swallowtail » 2018/08/31 08:20:08

TrevorH wrote:
2018/08/28 12:02:31
SpiderOak works on CentOS 7, not tried it on el6.
SpiderOak won't run on 6. I'm setting up a replacement 7 Samba / Bacula box (I needed to do it anyway) with SpiderOak, will see how that goes. They are all VMs so it's not a big difficulty. Dropbox will lose my money, not that they care.

swallowtail
Posts: 112
Joined: 2009/04/18 04:48:27

Re: Dropbox - glibc and file systems support

Post by swallowtail » 2018/09/01 08:35:45

OK, SpiderOak is slooooowwwww....

It does a full copy to the home directory of the user it is running as, then de-dupes it, tries to compress it (even though it already has been), and tries to upload in small chunks. I have a 90GB back-up file to do, and after about 8 hours it's done about 6GB (it spent about 4 hours doing all the pre-work) and is now running at about 4Mbps upload, i.e. about 10% of my max.

I'm running a Jottacloud upload at the same time to see which one finishes first...

tacvbo
Posts: 1
Joined: 2018/10/16 04:37:02

Re: Dropbox - glibc and file systems support

Post by tacvbo » 2018/10/16 04:39:58

There is another way, it might be not as easy and clean as the docker option but it's better to have some options around. This worked on a Centos 6.

I compiled glibc-2.27 at /opt/glibc-2.27/

Code: Select all

# tar xzvf glibc-2.27.tar.gz
# cd glibc-2.27
# mkdir build
# cd build
#  ../configure --prefix=/opt/glibc-2.27
# make && make install 
and then as user:

Code: Select all

% patchelf --set-interpreter /opt/glibc-2.27/lib/ld-2.27.so  ~/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-59.4.93/dropbox
% patchelf --set-rpath /opt/glibc-2.27/lib ~/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-59.4.93/dropbox
you might need to yum install patchelf.

prajwel
Posts: 2
Joined: 2017/09/20 11:09:09

Re: Dropbox - glibc and file systems support

Post by prajwel » 2018/10/16 12:13:06

jamespo wrote:
2018/08/30 09:53:50
You can run Dropbox containerized in Docker, I've just changed a Centos 6 machine to work like this.

https://www.webscalability.com/blog/201 ... for-linux/
Thank you! This helped me to install Dropbox on my Centos 7 system.

LeScooterBug
Posts: 1
Joined: 2018/10/16 16:33:40

Re: Dropbox - glibc and file systems support

Post by LeScooterBug » 2018/10/16 17:03:36

tacvbo wrote:
2018/10/16 04:39:58
There is another way, it might be not as easy and clean as the docker option but it's better to have some options around. This worked on a Centos 6.

I compiled glibc-2.27 at /opt/glibc-2.27/

Code: Select all

# tar xzvf glibc-2.27.tar.gz
# cd glibc-2.27
# mkdir build
# cd build
#  ../configure --prefix=/opt/glibc-2.27
# make && make install 
and then as user:

Code: Select all

% patchelf --set-interpreter /opt/glibc-2.27/lib/ld-2.27.so  ~/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-59.4.93/dropbox
% patchelf --set-rpath /opt/glibc-2.27/lib ~/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-59.4.93/dropbox
you might need to yum install patchelf.
@tacvbo - You beat me to the patchelf solution. Though, I set the configure prefix to "/opt/dropbox/rt" on my dev server and installed the headless Dropbox client using SSH to prevent it from complaining about missing libraries needed to open a browser window (I wasn't able to find a flag to just display the URL token).

I probably could have just switched to a different tty session (e.g., Ctrl+Alt+F5), but I didn't think of it at the time.

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