Enterprise File Fabric™
The reviews of our the recent release of our Android SMEStorage application have been very positive and its been well received by existing and new users of our service.. Below is an external video review of the App’
SMEStorage Android App Demo
Uploaded by iphoneapppodcast. – Discover more college videos.
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The File Fabric provides a Linux cloud drive that can be mounted on a file system and then used as a normal drive. Samba allows file and print sharing between computers running Windows and computers running Unix. Samba sets up network shares for chosen Unix directories (including all contained subdirectories). These appear to Microsoft Windows users as normal Windows folders accessible via the network.
A File Fabric Cloud Drive can be set up as a shared drive on a Linux file server allowing you to share it amongst many users on your network. This is useful if you want to share cloud resources from a single user account across many users.
Here is a step by step guide to configuring Samba and the File Fabric Linux drive. First, make sure you have installed Samba. Samba is included with most of the Linux distributions. For this we are using CentOS 5.5.
1. Make a backup of your /etc/samba/smb.conf file and then edit the smb.conf file (Make sure the workgroup is the same as the workgroup windows machines belong to.). It should have the following:
[global]
workgroup = WORKGROUP
encrypt passwords = yes
[smedrive]
comment = smedrive mount
path = /export/sme
read only = no
For further information on Samba configuration file please see http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/using_samba/ch06.html
2. The File Fabric Linux drive uses the open-source Fuse code and the out-of-the-box settings do not allow sharing in this manner. Therefore we need to create a file /etc/fuse.conf with the following one line content and after we do that the machine needs to be rebooted for it to take effect.
user_allow_other
For further information on Fuse please see http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/fuse/index.php?title=Fuse.conf
3. Create the directory where we will mount the drive:
# mkdir -p /export/sme
# chmod 1777 /export/sme
4. Add linux and samba users:
# groupadd smeuser
# useradd -m -n -ppassword -gsmeuser smeuser
# smbpasswd -a smeuser
New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:
Added user smeuser.
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5. In the File Fabric Client select File →Advanced and check share your drive check box. Mount the the File Fabric Linux drive make sure the mount folder is /export/sme. By default the File Fabric drive mounts with the “allow_other” option enabled.
6. Start the samba services
# service smb start
Starting SMB services: [ OK ]
Starting NMB services: [ OK ]
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7. Test the samba services.
8. If everything has gone correctly so far you can now mount the shared drive in windows and from the Finder in Mac OSX (using ‘Connect to Server->Go’) and any platform that supports SMB protocol
For windows make sure the workgroup is the same as defined in smb.conf file and you can ping the Linux machine.
9) Open a command prompt and run the command
net use t: file://localhost/smb/::172.16.195.161:smedrive /user:smeuser password
10. Open explorer you will see the drive appear in explorer
by Beta 4 of the Linux Cloud Drive will be released soon. This will add the ability to share the Linux Cloud Drive as an SMB/CIFS resource via Samba to networks that can mounts SMB/CIFS shares such as windows.
This provides a very easy mechanism to share clouds mounted via the SMEStorage Cloud Gateway to multiple network resources. Many public storage clouds can be shared this way, such as Amazon S3, Google Docs, RackSpace CloudFiles, MobileMe, Mezeo and many more. Importantly, SMEStorage also supports WebDav Resource endpoints which give companies an easy way to share legacy resources within a cloud files system environment directly from the desktop or command line.
The Linux Cloud Drive beta 4 will be released before the end of May.
by The SMEStorage iPhone Application, iSMEStorage has been approved by Apple and is in the App store. As per our previous blog post you can see a video on the functionality of iSMEStorage below, and you can purchase the App directly from here.
by We continue to work on the Mac Virtual Drive. We know that we are a little behind on this as to when we wanted to release it but you have probably seen from many of the recent blog posts that we have been working on a lot of things in Parallel !
We hope to be in a position to release the first beta towards the end of next week on our site, so keep checking back for this. It will be on our labs page.
In the meantime there are some screenshots below to show progress:
by For many of use in the office using Mac’s we’ve yearned for some tighter integration with SMEStorage and the Mac. You can choose to use the Windows explorer via Crossover or WINE with the Mac and it works nicely, and you can also use the Firefox plug-in which also works really well, but having OS level integration is always nice.
Snow Leopard has enhanced the integration of the automator services into the OS which makes it much easier to provide contextual functionality.
Using this method there is now available an add-in for users of SMEStorage to be able to upload their files directly from the Mac to their chosen cloud of choice (and we now support over 10 storage clouds), and after the file has been uploaded a unique link for the file will be copied to the clipboard.
You can view a video below that show this working with Google Docs:
by Recently we pushed out some WordPress plug-ins that enable you to backup your wordpress blog to any of the 10+ storage clouds we support, and a separate plug-in to enable you to share your cloud storage files easily from your blog via file links.
There are now two Joomla components created by Roman Gelembjuk. One mimics the WordPress component which easily enables you to share your Cloud Storage files on your Joomla site, and the second is a rich component that displays a file directory and enables you to easily manage and share files within the directory that are hosted on your choice of cloud storage. Below is an example of this directory. You can see this for yourself here.
SMEStorage File Directory download
SMEStorage File Share Download
Storage Clouds supported are Amazon S3, RackSpace Cloud Files, Google Docs, Box.net, Microsoft Live Mesh, Microsoft SkyDrive, Box.net, Apple MobileMe, GMail, Email Clouds, FTP, and any WebDav enabled Cloud.
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During a lightening talk at London CloudCamp we talked about the need for a multi-cloud storage API (slides below). We then presented the options currently available, and of course the SMEStorage multi-cloud API is one of several. We do believe we bring some nice things to the table with out API which include:
– REST based providing an SPI to multiple clouds
– Provides value added services over and above just upload/dowload, and file system view. There are too many to list, but these include file encryption, Email backup, ETL from one cloud to another cloud, content filtering, faxing and much, much more
– Ability to provide a single view of disparate data in different clouds – a cloud data unification within a single file system view.
If you are a developer take the time to check out the API and let us know how we can do more to help and what features you are looking for.
by There was an interesting post on PC World recently that asks the question “What happens to the data when an online storage site closes?”. After all two of the main reasons for offline storage are for backup and for access. What we are starting to see happen in the world of online storage is consolidation and of course the non sustainability of ‘free’ business models. As the article states, “Online storage services that have announced closings in the past ten months include big names in tech: AOL (Xdrive and AOL Pictures), Hewlett-Packard (Upline), Sony (Image Station), and Yahoo (Briefcase). Plenty of lesser-known online storage firms also have kicked the bucket, including Digital Railroad and Streamload MediaMax, which turned into The Linkup.”
One of the reasons we never used proprietary storage services for SMEStorage is that, ultimately, it is very difficult to keep up with the big guys in terms of price. Just look at Amazon. They are the 1oo pound gorilla of being able to sell at a high volume for low margin.
At SMEStorage we have concentrated on providing interoperability with best-of-breed Storage providers and building value services over and above this. For example things such as clients for different platforms, integrations with the best-of-breed Web 2.0, Desktop and social media tools. Innovations such as Email-backup-to-storage, and the ability to move data about from one storage provider to another. Or even have a real-time Cloud Data Backup which, if the primary provider disappears, will have kept the data in sync and available with a secondary provider. Key to this is that you own your data, not us.
If you are using our free Amazon S3 service we give you 250MB, but even using these you are free at any time to export it to any other provider you want at any time, including our other free services such as email-as-a-cloud or gmail-as-a-cloud, but of course you still own the account and therefore the data.
We believe that the most valuable thing is your data and we will keep doing all we can to help you keep it safe, accessible, and available.
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