Pulse sync as a NAS4free service

Pulse sync is an Open Source cluster synchronization client.It provides peer-to-peer synchronization with Digtal Certificate based node authentication, compression and transport encryption. In other words, cloud synchronization without a (third party) cloud. There is client software for Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, and Solaris.

NAS4Free is an embedded Open Source NAS distribution based on FreeBSD. It can be installed on an run from a USB memory stick. One appealing NAS4free feature is the use of encryption for its volumes.

Since there is an x64 BSD Pulse binary, it should be possible to run on NAS4free.

Copy Pulse binary to NAS4free

NAS4free volumes mounted on /mnt, in this case /mnt/disk0. Create a couple of folders there:

/mnt/disk0/pulse
/mnt/disk0/pulse/bin
/mnt/disk0/pulse/logs
/mnt/disk0/pulse/config
/mnt/disk0/sync

Copy the Pulse binary to the bin folder and chmod +x pulse.

Start Pulse manually

The Pulse configuration and certificates are created after the first start of Pulse. Start Pulse:

/mnt/disk0/pulse/bin/pulse -home=/mnt/disk0/pulse/config

You will get a screen like this:

Stop pulse with Ctrl+C.

Configure pulse for NAS4free

The NAS4free webserver runs per default on port 8080 and so does the Pulse webserver. To prevent conflicts change the next line in config.xml:

..
    <gui enabled="true" tls="false">
        <address>0.0.0.0:8081</address>
    </gui>
..

Since you are editing the config file anyway, also change the folder where the synced files are stored:

..
    <folder id="default" path="/mnt/disk0/sync" ro="false" rescanIntervalS="60" ignorePerms="false">
..

Check the Pulse webserver

Start Pulse again and browse to http://{IP address of NAS4free}:8081
You should get a screen like this:

Now you are good to go. A couple of things are left.

Automate the startup of Pulse

NAS4free has a method to issue commands to start up processes like Pulse. Go to Systems > Advanced > Command Scripts. Add the next command with "PostInit" selected:

/mnt/disk0/pulse/bin/pulse -home=/mnt/disk0/pulse/config >>/mnt/disk0/pulse/logs/pulse.log &

To check you Pulse NAS4free config reboot the NAS4free server and issue the pgrep pulse command. You should see 2 PIDs:

nas4free: pulse # pgrep pulse
2444
2436

Now you can configure all the other Pulse settings through the Pulse web interface.

Protect access to the Pulse website

To prevent unauthenticated and unsecured access to the NAS4free Pulse website you can set a username/password and tick the "Use HTTPS for GUI" box:

Happy syncing!