Segmentation Fault: Core dumped..;-)

Solving Bookmarks Synchronization problem

Posted : January 26, 2005 at 1:08 pm [America/Los_Angeles]

[via Matt: Synchronize Bookmarks]

Assumption:

1. You use Firefox to surf the web

Problem Statement:

If you find yourself using more than one computer to surf the web, you’ve faced this problem umpteen times - “How do I synchronize my Bookmarks across various computers that I use?”. Here’s is a quick list of features that I want:

• Allow me to download/sync my bookmarks from a central source
• Allow me to upload any changes made to the bookmarks back to the central source. In other words, make me use any computer/browser duo as the source of “new” bookmarks.
• Continue to add/edit my bookmarks using the approach natively supported by the browser of my choice (in this case, Firefox)
• Allow me to synchronize my bookmarks as effortlessly as possible
• Provide versioning of my bookmarks

The Solution:

This morning, I came across Firefox Bookmarks Synchronizer plugin. Here’s what the description of the plugin states:

Bookmarks Synchronizer is a Mozilla Firefox extension that let you connect to an FTP/WebDAV server and synchronize your bookmarks that are stored in an XML file. Setup is easy; just write in your FTP/WebDAV server address, username, password and a name for the XML file

Here’s what I did to setup and test this plugin:

1. Since FTP is not enabled on my server and I had no intention of enabling FTP for using this service, I decided to use WebDAV. So, to begin with, I first configured WebDAV support on the Apache instance running on my web server. I had compiled the module as a DSO when I had installed Apache a few years back, but I had not enabled it. So, all I had to do to enable WebDAV support in my Apache instance was to uncomment the following two lines:

LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so
LoadModule dav_fs_module modules/mod_dav_fs.so

The following two web sites were pretty helpful in getting my Apache WebDAV enabled:

Enabling WebDAV on Apache

Publishing Extensions with Apache 2

2. Created a folder (/usr/local/apache/htdocs/dav) for WebDAV publishing and told Apache about it by adding the following lines in my domain’s VirtualHost section:

DAVLockDB logs/DAVLock
DAVMinTimeout 600

<Location "/dav/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
DAV On
AuthName "DAV"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /usr/local/apache/conf/password.txt
AuthGroupFile /usr/local/apache/conf/groups.txt
Require group dav
</Location>

3. As a final step, I created a user (”test”) and a group (”dav”) using Apache’s htpasswd utility. Here are the steps that I took to accomplish this task:

[root (unix)]>cd /usr/local/apache/conf
[root (unix)]>touch password.txt groups.txt
[root (unix)]>../bin/htpasswd -b passwd.txt test test
[root (unix)]>echo "dav: test" >> groups.txt

4. Restart the Apache instance and your web server should now be DAV enabled!

5. Install Firefox Bookmarks Synchronizer plugin. Restart the browser for the plugin’s installation to complete.

6. Select Bookmarks | Synchronize Bookmarks and enter your Apache WebDAV credentials as shown below:

7. Click on “Upload” button. If you’ve set things up correctly, it will bring up a small window showing that your bookmarks were successfully uploaded!

8. Install Firefox Bookmarks Synchronizer plugin on a different computer’s Firefox instance. Configure it as shown in step 6 above. Click on “Download” button to download your exported bookmarks (in step 7 above) into your current Firefox instance.

Frankly, I am impressed at the simplicity of this plugin and the fact that it just works. As wonderful as this plugin is, I would like to see the following enhancements to it:

1. Support for CVS pserver/ssh protocol (just the check-in/check-out part)

2. Support for SFTP

HTH

- Anand

Category: Services and Software |