Although last week saw some pretty exciting developments in the cloud storage (Google Drive announcement and SkyDrive free 25Gb space), the truth is that Dropbox is still the king of the cloud storage hill – it's hands down the easiest to use and integrate.

I've been a Dropbox user for a few years now, but have started using it actively only in the last 12 months or so. It's been an invaluable tool for me thanks to its integration with 1Password, the password tool of my choice. Dropbox also helps with lots of day-to-day tasks and thats why I decided it's time to share some of the tips.

Having used Dropbox extensively on Windows systems (XP on laptop and Win7 on desktops), I've recently moved on to using Dropbox with my Mac OSX desktop and Linux hosting.

So here are the top tips for using Dropbox with Unix – each one does wonders for me and so I hope you like them as well.

Important: If you're not a Dropbox user yet, please use this link to sign up – it means I'll get a small bonus (extra 500MB to my free account) for referring you.

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I've got a few RedHat and CentOS VMs running on internal network of my server, and since updating them quite regularly is a habit I thought this little piece of advice will help all of you who run VMs in a similar scenario.

To make yum command use proxy, your best best is to edit /etc/yum.conf and add your proxy server reference:

proxy=http://192.168.3.1:3128

You don't have to restart anything but it may be a good idea to do yum clean all and then yum check-update:

[root@testvm1 ~]# yum check-update
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
* base: be.mirror.eurid.eu
* epel: epel.uni-oldenburg.de
* extras: be.mirror.eurid.eu
* updates: centosa5-msync-dvd.centos.org
base                                         | 3.7 kB 00:00
base/primary_db                              | 4.5 MB 00:01
cr                                           | 3.0 kB 00:00
cr/primary_db                                | 1.2 kB 00:00
epel                                         | 3.4 kB 00:00
epel/primary_db                              | 3.7 MB 00:00
extras                                       | 3.5 kB 00:00
extras/primary_db                            | 6.3 kB 00:00
updates                                      | 3.5 kB 00:00
updates/primary_db                           | 1.8 MB 00:01

Quite recently I came across a very interesting issue: while configuring passwordless SSH (it's public key based, so depending on you have it configured it may not be completely passwordless) access to some of my VPS servers, I found that the same keypair just wouldn't work on one of the servers.

Not only that, but the behaviour was quite bizzare: upon my first attempt to connect the public key would get rejected and a regular password would be requested by the ssh session. But once I successfully logged in with my password, any subsequent ssh connections would happily authenticate by my public key and would let me in without a problem.

Those of you using home dir encrypiton in Ubuntu are probably smiling right now! But becase I have never consciously configured or used this feature, it took me a good few hours to troubleshoot the issue and come up with the fix.

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It's been so unbelievably long since my last post on this blog that I decided to start this year with a non-technical welcome.

I have great plans for UnixTutorial in 2012, and would welcome any opportunity to share knowledge and experience with all of the readers and new visitors
of this blog.

Here's just a few of the things I plan to do:

• UnixTutorial members area – long time coming, this area of the website will finally make a proper debut in the next few months. I'll be announcing the next round of email subscriptions shortly, so don't miss out if you're still interested
• A series of UnixTutorial eBooks – eventually a balanced collection of free and paid material in PDF and Kindle formats (polls to decide which topis are in demand will follow shortly)
• Broader coverage of Unix topics – this year I expect to write a lot more about Mac OS and AIX systems
• New WordPress theme and quite likely a mobile copy of the website (let me know what devices you have, I own  iPhone and iPad so will do initial testing)
• Completion and expansion of the Basic Unix Commands and Advanced Unix Commands sections
• More Unix book reviews and recommendations
• Reviews of latest Unix-like OS releases
• Even more Questions and Answers

If you expect to see even more – now would be a really good time to let me know by leaving a comment. Thanks and stay tuned!