Dropbox, SSH, and iPhone
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Mrs. Murphy called and said she wanted to download a file from a Mac back home to her Macbook Air on the road. Away from the house I thought for a second about the easiest way to send her the file. I flicked through my iPhone apps and saw a simple solution.
My iPhone has both TouchTerm and Dropbox (syncs a local folder to the cloud) installed. TouchTerm let me ssh into the Mac at the house which was awake and recording a television show. From there a simple copy command let me copy the file into my Dropbox public folder. That was the hardest part.
Once the file copied over I launched the Dropbox app on the iPhone. The file was listed in my Dropbox public folder - allowing me to use the mail-a-link function in the app. Mrs. Murphy got the email, clicked the link to download her file - and she was all set.
Back when Murphy had more time to tinker he came up with far crazier solutions, like Retrieve a File on Your Mac by Email. Which is still great if you’re up against certain firewall restrictions or other obstacles. Better yet, that solution would have worked as soon as the Mac woke up, had it been asleep.
But this solution required far less preparation. I had ssh running on the remote Mac, and Dropbox was installed on both the Mac and my iPhone. That’s it. I could have used the Dropbox web interface instead of the app.
I realize there are other solutions Mrs. Murphy could have used. Logmein. FTP. VNC. Etc. Everyone has their preference, but I found this direct and efficient.
What do you think?
19. October 2009 at 7:20 pm :
Sounds simple, but how did you ssh into your home computer from outside your home network? Do you have a static ip address? The same question applies for using ftp and or vnc. LogMeIn would work without any foreknowledge of your Mac’s ip address, but requires signup.
…Ahhh, nevermind. I see in the “My Computers” tab on the dropbox “Account” page you can obtain your computer’s ip address from it’s last dropbox activity. Still, I am curious to know how you went about it in this example.
19. October 2009 at 11:58 pm :
My ip never changes, thanks to my ISP. So lucky for me I haven’t had to look into solutions for keeping up with a dynamic ip.
12. November 2009 at 11:19 am :
There’s always DynDNS. Not as perfect as a real static IP, but close.