Trouble

I've been having a good deal of trouble with Ubuntu 1, on 11.something.  Ubuntu One solidly occupies that perfect space where it is just barely stable enough to be useful, but not enough to be reliable.  It is a space of peak frustration.


First, performance was terrible on my PC.  I found the Ubuntu One daemon using 100% of the CPU.  With a bit of Googling I found that this is a common problem - it just goes crazy for no reason.  Ok...  In attempting various suggested solutions, I found right off that the normal shutdown command for the sync daemon would not work. But this did:


sudo killall -9 ubuntuone-syncdaemon


I also did this:


u1sdtool -q rm -rf ~/.local/share/ubuntuone u1sdtool -c

and rebooted.  Didn't help...  An I/O nice on the process would seem to be in order:

ionice -c 3 -p $( ps h -o pid -C ubuntuone-syncdaemon )

And this seemed to help, for a few minutes I thought it was ok.  But then the whole process died.

To take a step back, I think what started the trouble was that I accidentally unpacked a very large tar/zip into the sync'ed directory.  The system hit my account limit.  I'm here to tell you, don't let this happen.  It does NOT handle it well.  The software will begin to fail to connect to the service.

So while in the midst of trying to get the daemon to connect and run, I was also discovering, and deleting, the extra files.  I went and deleted them from another sync'ed computer too, which I think helped.

Also, at some point in there I did what, I guess, re-sets the local Ubuntu One "marks on the wall".


rm -rf ~/.local/share/ubuntuone

But somewhere in the middle of all this I was distracted by nautilius no longer functioning.  It was extremely sluggish, and eventually terminating.  Again, Googling this called for deleting various files and directories - none of which worked for me.

At some point though, after deleting a lot of things, and several changes and reboots,  nautilius, out of the blue started working.  I unfortunately can't pin this on any specific action on my part.  It just started working, while I was sitting there contemplating just going on with life, without it.

Then two things happened at about the same time.  One was that Ubuntu One appeared to start working, even though CPU was still swamped. 

Also, I looked at my Droid 2.  Verizon's service had set the date/time on my phone to about 2 days and an hour into the future.  I know it had been correct earlier in the day.  One problem at a time though...  Or two...  Or three...

Several hours later after a lot of goofing around, nautilius and Ubuntu One are working.  The date/time magically fixed itself in Verizon's network too.

However...

One of my most important files in the Ubuntu One sync directory is gone.  Fortunately I have other copies, having had prior experience with Ubuntu One over-writing newer files with older files (yes, it absolutely does that, although it hasn't happen in awhile), so I can in theory, put the file back.

But when I do this, Ubuntu One instantly deletes the file and creates a new conflict file with the desired content.  There appears to be nothing I can do about this.  I have to call the file something else.

I really shouldn't try using software that hasn't been out for 5 years.  Or should that be 10...  Performance on my PC is back to normal though.


In other interesting trivia, I also had Ubuntu One running on a Windows XP machine.  This was not easy to install, but that's another story.  The funny thing currently is that for the past 2 or 3 weeks, if I start the Ubuntu One GUI program on that machine, a dialog appears.  It tells me that an update is available and asks if I want to upgrade.  


At first I clicked "yes".  But nothing further happens and it has never done anything, apparently, because the dialog continues to appear.  So now I don't bother.