Recently, a Wall Street Journal posted an article claiming that Google accidentaly exposed private information of hundreds of thousands Google+ users over the course of last three years. Google found out about the security breach in March 2018 and quickly fixed the bug, but they kept silent about the issue.
Google is now thinking of shutting the service down but the exact date when the service will stop to work and exist is still unknown.
For the past several years I have been using Amazon S3 to backup my WHM/cPanel accounts. It works quite good but the problem is Amazon’s complex pricing model (that charges you for things like diskspace, bandwidth, requests) making price for the service is quite unpredictable. I’ve read on many places that people often got surprised at the end of the month receiving the bill from Amazon.
Recently I have started testing DigitalOcean Spaces, a service similar to Amazon’s S3 (S3 compatible alternative) but with a pricing structure anyone can understand: for $5/month you get 250 GB of storage and 1 TB of outbound transfer (inbound transfer is free like on S3). If you need more than that it will cost you 2cents per every additional GB of storage and 1cent for every additional of outbound GB. Also first two months for every new space are free!
While experimenting with s3fs I have also found out another tool written in go programming language that named Goofys. Like s3fs, this tool can also mount Amazon S3 bucket as a folder that can later be accessed just like any other local folder making accessing files in S3 bucket, backing up data or syncing files quite easy. Detailed installation manual for Goofys covers only Mac while Linux installation guide is basically non-existing, so this will be my guide on how to install Goofys and mount Amazon S3 bucket on an Ubuntu Linux. This has been tested on DigitalOcean droplet running a Ubuntu version 16.04.3 x64. If you’re also testing this out on a new VPS like me – make sure to execute apt-get update before you start.
But why would anyone want to use Goofys if s3fs is working fine? Well, according to benchmarks available at Goofys github main reason you would like to use this is performance! Goofys is much faster than s3fs. For some operations Goofys is ten times faster than s3fs making it the right choice for situations when you need access to S3 to be really fast (or as close as it being just a folder on the same drive).
How to install Go language on Ubuntu Linux?
As mentioned above Goofy is written in GO so we need to install GO in order to use Goofy. Installing go requires you to download the latest version from https://golang.org/dl/ unpack it:
<code># Download Go language binary
wget https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.9.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz
# Unpack the downloaded fole to /usr/local
tar -C /usr/local -xvzf go1.9.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz
# Remove the archive
rm go1.9.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz
# Create the Go language work directories
mkdir -p /go/projects/goofys/{bin,pkg,src}</code>
No create this file path.sh at /etc/profile.d path
<code>vi /etc/profile.d/path.sh</code>
copy paste the line below, save the changes and exit:
AWS CLI is required by Goofy and installation is pretty straight forward:
<code>apt-get install awscli</code>
How to install Gooofy on Ubuntu Linux?
Once Go language is installed correctly, installing Goofy is quite simple. All you need to do is simply execute these two commands:
<code>go get github.com/kahing/goofys
go install github.com/kahing/goofys</code>
At this point Goofy should be installed and in order to use it we need to save
Setting up Amazon S3 credentials
To allow AWS CLI to access your S3 buckets create store credentials at this file:
<code># Make the hidden folder that holds the AWS credentials file
mkdir ~/.aws
# Create and start editing the credentials file
vi ~/.aws/credentials</code>
Don’t forget to copy/paste your actual AWS access and secret keys above. Save and exit once you’re done.
Check if AWS S3 is working
To verify if the credentials are right and that you have entered them correctly, list all the buckets using:
<code>aws s3 ls</code>
The response should show the list of available buckets.
For this test I have created a new bucket called GeekTnT
Mounting a Amazon S3 bucket with Gooofy
Now let’s create a folder where we will mount our bucket. For the purpose of this post we’ll create a folder /backup and we’ll mount GeekTnT bucket on it.
<code># Creates a backup folder
mkdir /backup
# Mount a GeekTNT.com bucket to a /backup folder
/go/projects/goofys/bin/goofys GeekTnT /backup</code>
And the final result is that now we have an s3 bucket mounted to our /backup folder with basically unlimited disk space (1PB) that we can use to store data or backups.
Unmounting the S3 bucket is simple. Just execute:
<code>umount /backup</code>
Checking if it actually works
Everything seems fine – but does it work. To test that out I’ll create a file in /backup folder and since this is a new DigitalOcean droplet and I have no bigger files that I can copy, I’ll download a Go language installation file directly into /backup folder.
If everything works these should automatically be available inside Amazon’s console.
If you’re a web developer developing in local environment you most probably use .dev for projects you are working on. If you’re using Valet on Mac development is quite simple since every folder from your projects folder is instantly accessible in browser if you just enter folder name and add .dev. It works like magic without messing with any hosts files. It just works!
But then Google decided to complicate things a bit. First they have forced all .dev domains to use SSL. Since December 2017 Google Chrome version 63 started redirecting to all .dev domains to secure protocol replacing http:// with https:// in your urls without even asking you. The reason for that is maybe somehow related to fact that Google bought the .dev making it a legit gTLD. They don’t sell these (yet) and the use for this, and for more than 100 other gTLD Google now owns (including .app, .foo), is unknown but for sure it’s going to complicate lives of web developers.
Almost all operating systems cache DNS records to improve the performance of applications and speed up internet access. Browsers do cache DNS records too and to flush these the easiest way is just to close the browser and start ti again. But sometimes there is a need to flush operating system DNS cache. Here’s how you can do that easily.
How to flush DNS cache on Windows XP / Windows Vista?
Step 1: Open the Command Prompt
Click on the Start Menu and click Run. Type in cmd and hit Enter.
Step 2: Flush DNS
Type ipconfig /flushdns and hit Enter.
How to flush DNS cache on Windows Vista or Windows 7?
Step 1: Open the Command Prompt
Click on the Start Menu and type cmd in the search bar and hit Enter.