Mounting Rackspace Cloud Files to Linux Using CloudFuse

This article shows how to mount Cloud Files as a directory on an Ubuntu 10.10 Cloud Server using CloudFuse software. This will allow you to access your Cloud Files container data inside a Linux server, just like any other file or folder.

Note: This process will give you easy access to your Cloud Files data, but in no way are we recommending that you use the mounted Cloud Files container as a location for any database/application. Running an application directly from the container would be exceptionally slow.

So, why would one want to mount a Cloud Files container to your Linux Cloud Server? Well, there are plenty of uses for having system-level access to your Cloud Files. For instance, if you have some scripts which create database or website backups, those scripts can create backups automatically into Cloud Files without you needing to use the API or File Manager in the Control Panel.

Note: The following commands are tried and tested on Ubuntu 10.10, but they should be applicable to other versions of Ubuntu or Debian. As long as you install the required packages, you should be able to compile CloudFuse code and use it.

Compiling and installing CloudFuse

First, download the CloudFuse code from cloudfuse-0.1.tar.gz. This tar.gz file has been uploaded and is maintained on github. It is shared here, and has been tested so that all the following steps will work fine. New code changes in the repository can cause compile-time errors. So, download the code from the above link. Extract the file, and then compile the software.

 
:~$ tar -xzvf cloudfuse-0.1.tar.gz

Once you have extracted the .tar.gz file, you should have following files under the cloudfuse-0.1 directory.

 
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1# ls -la
total 280
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root   4096 Feb 21 21:47 .
drwx------ 4 root root   4096 Feb 21 21:47 ..
drwxr-xr-x 8 root root   4096 Feb 21 21:47 .git
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1059 Feb 21 21:47 LICENSE
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1024 Feb 21 21:47 Makefile.in
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   2332 Feb 21 21:47 README
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  12014 Feb 21 21:47 cloudfsapi.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1043 Feb 21 21:47 cloudfsapi.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  11240 Feb 21 21:47 cloudfuse.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   4335 Feb 21 21:47 config.h.in
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 198521 Feb 21 21:47 configure
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1324 Feb 21 21:47 configure.in
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  13184 Feb 21 21:47 install-sh
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1#

Now it is time to compile CloudFuse and install it. You will need the following utilities and their dev packages installed in order to build it: libcurl, libfuse, and libxml2

CloudFuse is built and installed like any other autoconf-configured code. Normally:

 
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1# ./configure
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1# make
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1# sudo make install

But, first you need to install the required packages, otherwise the ./configure command will fail and generate errors.

 
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1# apt-get update
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1# apt-get install gcc
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1# apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1# apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-dev
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1# apt-get install libfuse-dev

Now run the following command in the cloudfuse-0.1 source code directory

 
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1# ./configure
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of executables...
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... none needed
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking for a thread-safe mkdir -p... /bin/mkdir -p
checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config
checking pkg-config is at least version 0.9.0... yes
checking for XML... yes
checking for CURL... yes
checking for FUSE... yes
.........
............
configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating Makefile
config.status: creating config.h
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1# make
gcc -g -O2 -I/usr/include/libxml2     -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -I/usr/include/fuse   -o cloudfuse cloudfsapi.c cloudfuse.c -lxml2   -lcurl   -pthread -lfuse -lrt -ldl
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1# make install
/usr/bin/install -c cloudfuse /usr/local/bin/cloudfuse
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1#

If everything went fine, you should now have CloudFuse installed properly. Confirm this by running the which command. It should show the location of the CloudFuse binary file.

 
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1# which cloudfuse
/usr/local/bin/cloudfuse
root@ubuntu-test:~/cloudfuse-0.1#

Mounting Cloud Files:

Now let’s use CloudFuse to mount our Cloud Files.

You'll have to create a configuration file for CloudFuse in your home directory and put your Rackspace Cloud Files username and API key in it, as shown below:

 
$HOME/.cloudfuse
    username=[username]
    api_key=[api key]
    authurl=[auth URL]

Auth URLs:

US Cloud Files account: https://auth.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0

UK Cloud Files account: https://lon.auth.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0

The following entries are optional. You can define these values in the .cloudfuse file.

 
     use_snet=[True to use snet for connections]
     cache_timeout=[seconds for directory caching, default 600]

After creating the above configuration file, run the cloudfuse command as follows. The syntax should be as simple as:

 
cloudfuse [mount point]

So, you should be able to mount Cloud Files like this

 
root@ubuntu-test:/# mkdir cloudfiles
root@ubuntu-test:/# cloudfuse /cloudfiles

If you run the # ls -la command inside the /cloudfiles directory you should see your Cloud Files containers.

If you are not logged in as the user root on the system, then your username will need to be part of the "fuse" group. This can be accomplished with the following command:

 
sudo usermod -a -G fuse [username]

If you are unable to see any containers inside the mountpoint, then one or more of the above steps didn't work properly. You will need to repeat the process, and verify that all of the above steps were followed precisely.