Make Dropbox Run On CentOS 7
You may have noticed that Dropbox has dropped support for operating systems with glibc earlier than 2.19, and they are also requiring that everyone use ext4. In reality, they just need xattr support, which many filesystems support. I am guessing they just don’t want to deal with possible bugs on other filesystems so they are only certifying for ext4. At this time, they do not appear to be using glibc 2.19 specific functionality, so we can use a LD_PRELOAD to inform Dropbox that it is running under glibc 2.19 and that it is running on an ext4 filesystem.
We have this working and tested at Stanford University’s Physics department for KIPAC and their terabytes of scientific data.
Important: This is a workaround and is not supported by Dropbox. We have no affiliation with Dropbox and it is possible that this fix will stop working if Dropbox starts requiring functionality from glibc 2.19 that is not available in your glibc release. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DATA LOSS. This is provided WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Now that you have agreed to the legal disclaimer, you may try it for yourself: https://www.linuxglobal.com/src/unbox/unbox.c
To build, do this:
gcc -shared -fPIC unbox.c -o unbox.so -ldl
You can then test it by running it under LD_PRELOAD:
]# LD_PRELOAD=`pwd`/unbox.so df -Th
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs ext4 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev
tmpfs ext4 2.0G 8.0K 2.0G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs ext4 2.0G 209M 1.8G 11% /run
tmpfs ext4 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/centos-root ext4 66G 63G 966M 99% /
/dev/vda1 ext4 477M 326M 127M 73% /boot
/dev/mapper/centos-var ext4 2.0G 1.4G 532M 72% /var
/dev/mapper/centos-tmp ext4 969M 4.4M 898M 1% /tmp
tmpfs ext4 396M 0 396M 0% /run/user/0
Note that all of the filesystems are listed as ext4, and Dropbox will see it this way, too. To run Dropbox, you will need to put the LD_PRELOAD in front of it like so:
LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/unbox.so exec /usr/local/dropbox-2.10.0/bin/dropbox "$@"
The `dropbox` file being referenced above is a Python script provided by Dropbox which you can get from here: https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux
Note that because Dropbox now requires xattrs, NFS will not work (even with this work-around) until NFS supports xattrs. Conceivably, one could extend Unbox to implement xattrs in userspace using something like sqlite and linking them by inode. If anyone is interested in doing this, contact us and we may be able to help you develop that.
I hope this helps, feel free to forward this link to others that may benefit!
-Eric