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I am curious kid on the web, trying to learn more about life and other things. I enjoy building things and my medium of expression is mostly code. I have been dabbling with OpenEdx recently. I love to talk about distributed system, I have taken up learning Rust recently and been writing Python, Golang and JavaScript for a while.
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Reverse-engineering a ₹2,000 Wi-Fi toy drone to understand its firmware, protocols, and limits.
This year was full of surprises, mostly pleasant ones; the year was filled with friendships and travels. Towards the end of last year, Anirudha and I started working on Rust and tried picking it up. He started a project called Feluda, and I started c...
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I have been using a PKM called Zim Wiki for a long time now. The thing that I have struggled with Zim Wiki is when I have to work on different devices and I don't have my copy of Zim Wiki.
To be honest Zim Wiki is not all fancy with cloud-sync and multi-device support but following the Unix Philosophy of doing just one thing and doing it well, helps me to organize and retrieve information that is valuable to me.
There was a time when I use to back up my copy of Zim on dropbox. Now, in order to maintain a single source of truth, I use to sync the copy of my Zim notes to dropbox every minute using a cronjob.
The thing that goes wrong is if the cronjob fails for whatever reason, or I shut down the device before cron job and that will land me up in a conflicting situation.
These problems pushed me to come up with a slightly better management system.
I didn't know I could mount a filesystem of a VPS on my local system. Previously, I use to use either scp or rsync to transfer files from and to the remote machine. SSHFS is a filesystem client that can help to mount files and directories on the remote server to your local machine.
This is a revelation to me because now I can use my remote server as a centralized place to serve my zim-wiki.
This is very simple, first, we need to install sshfs on the local machine.
sudo apt install sshfs
Then we need to mount the remote files and directories in a pre-existing directory.
sudo sshfs -o nonempty,reconnect,allow_other,default_permissions,IdentityFile=<ssh-private-key> <user>@<hostname>:/path-to-remote /local-path
And now we can just rsync zim-wiki files by:
rsync -avzh ~/zim-notes/notebooks ~/aws-vps/zim-wiki/
Make sure that directories are synced. Now just open zim-wiki and add the notebook. :)
And voila!
When internet connection goes down, the application will start hanging in that case first we need to kill the sshfs process and then unmount the directory.
sudo pkill -kill -f "sshfs"
And then unmount the directory
sudo fusermount -u /home/aws-vps
I have tried to accommodate the erratic connection in mind and introduce reconnect option in sshfs. This arrangement has workout miracles for me in terms of management.