There’s currently no way to talk to a Jungle Disk directly on Dreamhost, though there’s no technical reason why you couldn’t write a script to do it – the source is available at the bottom of http://www.jungledisk.com/download.shtml and anyone who wants to write, say, a perl script to talk directly to S3 from Dreamhost is welcome to do it, e.g. by reading files and then writing the appropriate keys via Net::Amazon::S3. (You definitely couldn’t actually mount it as a filesystem on DreamHost – we don’t have FUSE, and I think that’s a good thing – thousands of users mounting filesystems on a shared web host wouldn’t be a great idea…)

The way Jungle Disk works is via caching – when I rsync to my machine, it’s writing to a cache as fast as it can receive over the rsync connection. The Jungle Disk software is then pulling files out of that cache and writing them out to S3 as fast as IT can. However, it’s *not* removing files from the cache – it keeps them in the cache to be able to be read again if needed.

The neat thing about JD is the way it lets you have an infinitely sized disk. One of my Jungle Disk volumes is a media library. I have a 150GB physical disk that used to contain a whole bunch of music, home videos, other large things. Before that, I had a 50GB disk, and before that… etc. When I ran out of space recently, instead of getting a bigger disk, I copied all my data to a Jungle Disk volume, and erased the disk. Then, I mounted the volume, and set the *cache* to reside on that 150GB disk. Now, my media library can grow as big as I want. The most recently accessed 150GB of my media library will always be instantly accessible, as it will be a “cache hit”. In the event of a “cache miss”, I have to wait for the file to arrive from Amazon (I get about 2MB/sec). It’s almost as good as having an infinitely sized disk.

And before them, I had endless mystery download failures when using godaddy. Whoever said we’re getting what we pay for is pretty much spot on, I’m afraid. Generally speaking dreamhost provides a better service than most of the other cheapies. Obviously, this wasn’t one of those times.

-R

It appears that whatever system they use to store their customer / authentication data was unavailable to the rest of their network.

Seems like the infrastructure hasn’t yet gotten ahead of all the growth that they’ve been experiencing.

http://www.hostcritique.com/

Thanks.