Amazon S3 Cloud Storage on Leopard 10.5.7; a European War Tale

A little while ago I've subscribed to Amazons S3 cloud storage service. Up to now I've been using it sparingly and the main interface to it has been S3Fox, a Firefox extension. This has actually worked reasonably well, even though its not necessarily the most intuitive interface, its still fairly easy to understand (for those that have been around long enough, think Norton Commander style). One of the great advantages for me has been that through virtue of the fact that Firefox is multi-platform, so is access to S3 through S3Fox. An important fact for me, since I use Linux, Mac OS X and Windows interchangeably.

Today I decided I wanted a better, more intuitive way to interact with S3 starting with my Mac (which I use most often). There were a number of items needed:
1. MacFUSE; a Filesystem User Space Environment
2. S3FS from Google Code, which needs to be compiled.

The whole process is all described here, so I won't repeat that.

Once you have installed MacFUSE and compiled the s3fs program, you are ready to mount your own S3 bucket and start filling it up with either backups (rsync'ing it for instance) or just as an extra HD. You could even mount multiple buckets.

The picture below shows what it looks like.










One point of note; I was unsuccessful trying to mount buckets located in Europe. It gave me a 301 error and it is unclear why. I saw a discussion in the Amazon AWS dev forum, but there was no answer from Amazon even...

So for now, use only US buckets and this should work.

UPDATE:
It turns out it doesn't work... Eventhough the S3 bucket gets loaded, it doesn't accept any files, nor can we create directories. So far I've been unable to determine the cause of this problem. It seems that there is a paid version of S3fs but the pricing ($129) seems disproportionate to its utility... the forums for s3fs also seem void of clear guidance on what the problem could be. So far I've been able to determine that there is an issue with requests to Amazon S3 that this program generates. What I don't understand is that not more people have complained about this so I'm guessing that there may be a version issue with underlying libraries being used by S3fs that only I (and 2 others seem to be experiencing)...

Bandwidth Testing part 2

Continued on with my bandwidth testing, these are the results after having restarted the cable modem (which supposedly updated its firmware) as instructed by my ISP's support folks. Below are the results:



And below the results from Speedtest.net whom btw make use of the same software but a different server infrastructure I'm sure. The interesting thing is that their results are actually better than those measured solely on Telenet's network (although only marginally so).


The above results are measured on an Asus EEE PC 900 (with built-in wifi of the 802.11b/g denomination).

The results below here are measured on a Macbook running Mac OS X 10.5.6 and a built-in Airport Extreme of the 802.11n (draft) denomination...



And again using the ISP's meter:


Ok so clearly the Asus EEE PC 900's wifi is the bottleneck in these tests and the Macbook is able to use bandwidth all the way up to the ISP's limits...

I wonder if my abhorrent download results earlier were a function of limits at the server I was downloading from or if there was something else limiting going on... hard to troubleshoot these transient type issues.

Anyhow, back to report these results to the support folks @ my ISP....

To be continued....

Bandwidth Testing

I have been experiencing strange delays with my Internet download speeds lately that have started to bug me so much that I decided to report the issue to my ISP and see if they are able to help resolve this.

I have a so called Turbonet subscription which entitles me (according to Telenet's) latest being adertized on their website to 25Mbps download speed. Originally was sold to me as 20Mbps tho.

The main thing I've noticed is download speeds have become irratic and slow at times.

It so happens that a little while go a started measuring my dl speeds and at first I got this:


The download seems fairly close to what is to be expected, the upload speed tho seems only half of what is to be expected.

The second measurement (which was actually earlier this evening (on a Windows 7 machine):



This shows less then half of what its supposed to be...

I then later did a second test from my Ubuntu Netbook and got the following result:



Very similar to the results earlier from the Windows machine so I'm ruling out any computer related problems.

Finally the result from my ISP's bandwidth meter:


So there my upload speed dropped again, otherwise its close to the other 2 results of this evening.

Now I'm supposed to reset my router, which I will do tomorrow. This reset is supposed to load the router with its latest firmware according to my ISP.

I'll retest tomorrow, to be continued....