Install a corporate proxy for Dropbox to reduce network bandwidth

dropboxPROXY

One of our IT people was working on a Dropbox proxy before he left, but he gave no information about what he was doing.

What we want to do is have some sort of proxy on our server that allows users on the network to download Dropbox files from the proxy instead of the cloud. We're trying to fix a problem where one person will upload a file through Dropbox, and then everyone else in the network slams the router trying to download that file from Dropbox at the same time.

Would a peer-to-peer solution (like AeroFS, I believe) work better in this case?

Best Answer

Dropbox LAN Sync is what you want to enable.

Quoting from https://www.dropbox.com/help/137/en

LAN sync is a Dropbox feature that speeds syncing dramatically when the file exists on your Local Area Network (LAN).

What does that mean exactly? Well, when you add a file to your computer's Dropbox, the file is then synced with Dropbox servers. Dropbox will then initiate the syncing process as soon as it determines a change has been made to the file. All linked computers and shared folders will then download any new version of the file. With LAN syncing, Dropbox will look for the new file on your Local Area Network first, bypassing the need to download the file from Dropbox servers, thus speeding up the syncing process considerably.

LAN sync is an extra advantage for use in locations where computers are networked together over the same router or other local area network.

Related Solutions

Dumping rawdata for a host on a proxy using tcpdump

You may have a problem with different interfaces. By default tcpdump only listens on the first ethernet interface it finds. If you add "-i any" it will listen on every interface.

As someone has mentioned already, you will end up capturing all the traffic to a particular ip address, regardless of the dns name you want. You can reduce the amount of data you capture by restricting the filter further. You could add a port and specify a particular remote host or network.

# tcpdump host 12.34.56.78 and port 80 and net 78.65.43.21/24

You may find that tcpflow is more useful to you. It will dump each side of a TCP connection into a separate file. You can either use it with the same filter you'd use with tcpdump, or you can load a pcap file in. To save a pcap file, run:

# tcpdump -s 0 -w /tmp/dump.pcap -i any host 12.34.56.78 and port 80

IE proxy exclusions – help!

Any computer connected to our internal network has a setting in their internet explorer that says if they are visiting *.ourdomain.com

If I understand your question correctly the majority of your servers on your domain exist on your internal network and you do not want to proxy those, but you do want to proxy the externally hosted servers.

One way to do this may be to simply remove the *.ourdomain.com exception and instead add exceptions based on your internal address space. So if you where using private addresses inside your network you might add an exception like this 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16. Of course you would just use the network or networks that is actually being used.

You might suggest to your IT guys to also consider setting up WPAD this technology allows you to specify the exceptions and proxy configuration in a single javascript file hosted somewhere on your network. I find that a WPAD configuration is far easier to maintain then the a group policy exception list. WPAD is supported by most browsers, although you do have to enable it on Firefox.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Dumping rawdata for a host on a proxy using tcpdump

IE proxy exclusions – help!

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