Sailfish Os Photo Sync With Ftps E Dot G Fritzbox Nas

May 17, 2016 2 min read jolla linux photo saifish sync

Today many users sync their photos and videos with some cloud webspace. Other users have privacy concerns and sync with their owncloud installation or a local NAS. I am one of these other users.

With my Jolla smartphone I was looking for a way to easily sync all photos to some local storage. As a result some linux scripting on the phone and a USB stick in my Fritzbox (Router,AP) did the trick.

My implementation was inspired by some german instruction of how to sync sailfish photos with owncloud (https://blog.mdosch.de/2015/03/05/sailfish-fotos-automatisch-zur-owncloud-hochladen/). At the end I did nearly the same. I will only mention the differences here.

My Fritzbox can act as NAS. You can access connected storage via Webdav, FTPS (and Samba?). What do we need to do:

Creating a user (e.g. photo-sync-user) on the router with read/write privileges to some directory. Let’s assume that the router has the IP 192.168.0.10.
Install lftp on jolla phone. lftp can mirror directories via FTP in a very handy way. Via Warehouse App the lftp tool can easily be installed. Installation needs some time. Depending libraries are installed automatically.
Test accessing local storage on Fritzbox. It raises an error because the certificate is not trusted by lftp :

[nemo@Jolla ~]$ lftp photo-sync-user@192.168.0.10
Password: 
lftp photo-sync-user@192.168.0.10:~> ls
ls: Fatal error: Certificate verification: self signed certificate (...)

Thanks to the Internet (http://www.versatilewebsolutions.com/blog/2014/04/lftp-ftps-and-certificate-verification.html) we can solve this problem easily. Download the certificate from the fritzbox and save it as ~/.lftp/fritzboxcert.crt on the phone. After that create the file ~/.lftp/rc with the following content:

set ssl:ca-file "~/.lftp/fritzboxcert.crt"

Now the lftp command returns valid result via FTPS.

Create scripts on phone for syncing. All steps are explained in the other tutorial. I changed the final sync script to try only once to sync after some change in directory happened.

    #!/bin/sh
    
    # Check if we're on wifi
    if [ $(/sbin/ifconfig | grep -o wlan0) ]; then
        #sync only when connected to wifi
        #sync via FTPS
        lftp -e "mirror -R ~/Pictures/  jolla/;quit" -u photo-sync-user,INPUTPASSWORDHERE 192.168.0.10
    fi
    
    exit

Finally every time a new photo was taken my jolla phone will (try to) sync all camera pictures (~/Pictures/) to the USB stick connected to my router (into folder jolla/).