I am a fan of the JungleDisk product. At my company it provides backup services for all of our MS-Windows workstations using the Workgroup edition. And, we have a few copies of the Server edition providing backup services for several of our virtualized servers with instances of both Ubuntu Linux 14.04 and MS-Windows Server 2012.

However, I do much of my development on workstations (and a notebook) that run the desktop version of Ubuntu Linux 14.04 64bit.

Getting JungleDisk (junglediskworkgroup_316-0_amd64.deb) running in this enviroment is difficult. In fact of all the productivity apps, utilities and development tools I regularly use it is the most difficult package to install and configure.

First, Rackspace (the company that owns the JungleDisk product) does not submit a “deb” package to the repositories included by default (or easily activated) in a standard Ubuntu installation. Second, there is a common site containing community contributed repositories for special and cutting/bleeding edge packages, http://ppa.launchpad.net/, and Rackspace does not provide a repository at this location either. Third, they provide no custom repository on there own servers — which would seem be a no brainer — as they also sell all manner of hosting services. Allocating one virtual instance to host a repository — for one program — would be ZERO hardship for this firm.

If you wish to install this package you must download the appropriate “deb” from their website. Not a big deal in and of itself but really a throw back to circa 1994 when the Debian distribution was just really getting rolling and all the bugs weren’t yet worked out of the apt-get repository system.

In 2014 in the “deb” world software installation is almost “auto-magical.”

The real rub is that once you have located the package (after having setup and paid for your account) and downloaded it to your Ubuntu Linux workstation you must overcome several configuration obstacles in order to get the program to work as advertised. And, it would seem, that these obstacles are acknowledged by Rackspace (and have been around since version 11 of Ubuntu.)

With some attention to the installation package these issues would not be difficult to resolve so that they are not an item of dissatisfaction to their customers.

So, here are my install notes for junglediskworkgroup_316-0_amd64.deb on Ubuntu Linux 14.04. They strongly depend on efforts of others on the next who have taken active steps to work around the apparent neglect of the Linux version of this product. What follows is what I have cobbled together from various other posts on the net.

I hope these notes save you some time in getting what is at its core a good product.

1. Download the deb package from JungleDisk

junglediskworkgroup_316-0_amd64.deb

2. Install the the deb package

sudo dpkg -i junglediskworkgroup_316-0_amd64.deb

3. Create a symlink for a library that is no longer included in Ubuntu as a new version exists. We’re simply linking to the new version. Again, this should be an easy directive addition to the deb. But the question remains… Why frustrate a user — particularly a novice user — with this kind of obstacle?

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnotify.so.4 /usr/lib/libnotify.so.1

4. At this point you should be able the run the junglediskworkgroup command as a regular user and follow the standard setup instructions on their site for configuring the utility

junglediskworkgroup

5. After configuration the problem is that when one attempts to launch junglediskworkgroup in order to monitor, re-configure or restore files the user encounters and error along the lines of:

Jungle Disk Workgroup is running in standalone mode and has detected that the service is already running, or the service network port is in use.

6. Fortunately, a user named “gurqn” over at launchpad.net has added a package that allows you to add ‘junglediskworkgroup’ to a ‘whitelist’ of sorts so that you can access the standalone jungledisk service without the above error. To take advantage of gurqn‘s efforts issue the following commands

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install --with-recommends dconf-editor
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:gurqn/systray-trusty
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade

7. Run dconf-editor under your normal user account

dconf-editor

8. In dconf-editor navigate to

com >> canonical >> unity >> unity-gtk-module

and in the right hand window enter the following value exactly next to the whitelist item:

['junglediskworkgroup', 'junglediskwg']

Again, this entry couldn’t be automated in the install routine? This would totally throw a novice user.

9. Logout. Or, better yet reboot the workstation. After you log back in you will be able to launch the JungleDiskWorkgroup monitor interface.

From that point forward the program will run reliably and well.

All of the above issues aside this really is a very good product. I would suspect that one of their in house developers could fix these issues in a morning. But, these items have remained a blemish on the product since at least 2011. I know programmers are busy but to not be able to carve out a morning to fix these issues in 3 years? Really?!?

As a developer myself I understand always being on the wrong side of a long to-do list. But, at some point you just have to make quality and user experience a priority.

The server edition of the product — which doesn’t seem to suffer any of these quality issues — was a major enabler in allowing the company I work for to move to a VERY low cost Linux infrastructure with the security of a viable commercial backup solution. And, the Windows workstation product — with few exceptions — has been bullet proof on our Windows workstations. But, these quality issues on the Linux Workstation version of the product are just inexcusable.

Rackspace/JungleDisk is a sharp outfit. I know they can do better.

Please fix these issues. I have more Linux workstations that need your backup solution. I want to spend my budget money with you. Help me to do that.