Installing Dropbox on your EC2 machine

IMPORTANT: Dropbox will sync everything you have to your EC2 machine, so if you are already using Dropbox for a lot of stuff, you might want to create a separate Dropbox account just for the course.

Start at the login prompt on your EC2 machine:

cd /root

Then, grab the latest dropbox installation package for Linux:

wget -O dropbox.tar.gz "http://www.dropbox.com/download/?plat=lnx.x86_64"

Unpack it:

tar -xvzf dropbox.tar.gz

Make the Dropbox directory on /mnt and link it in:

mkdir /mnt/Dropbox
ln -fs /mnt/Dropbox /root

and then run it:

~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd &

When you get a message saying “this client is not linked to any account”, copy/paste the URL into browser and go log in. Voila!