Fran's blog

I must find the manner of use the same GNUCash files from different machines, one with GNU/Linux and another one with Windows. I’ll put those files in a host that may be accessed by the two machines through SSH.

So, the first thing we need is remote SSH access to that file system. As with GNU/Linux is not difficult, I’ll explain here how to do that with Windows XP. Its not difficult neither, but is less known.

You need to download these files:

• Dokan library
• Dokan SSHFS

Unzip and execute its installation programs in the same order. If you get an error on the second one, meaning that the installation was aborted near the end, you probably need to install this before: Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package

After installing it, you should configure your SSH connection and attach it to a drive letter.

Dokan SSHFS config

Put your remote hostname instead of “myhost.com”, your user in that host instead of “myhostuser”, the folder in which you’ll store your GnuCash files in “Server Root”, and the letter of the drive you want to link with that remote location. After doing this, press “Save” for further uses of same configuration, and then insert your remote ssh password on “Password” and press con “Connect”.

If everything is ok, you’ll get a tiny dialog box saying “sshfs start”, and an icon with “SSH” red letters will appear on the right of your tasks bar. Now, if you open a file explorer window you’ll see the new DOKAN “S:” drive that we’ll use for storing our GnuCash files.

Dokan drive

Once you has your drive mounted, its time to install GNUCash if you haven’t done it before. You can get the lastest stable version for Windows from here. Click on “Download” and select that called something like gnucash-x.x.x-setup.exe. It will be a big file as it comes with lot of libraries for work in windows, so it’ll take a while to download it.

Once downloaded, just execute the file. You may leave the default options or select custom ones if you know what are you doing. Once installed, run the program.

You may create a new account set, and after doing that, just go to File/Save As, and select the drive letter you have linked before with SSHFS, give the file a name (for example, “accountancy”), and press on “Save” button. If you’ve access through SSH with Putty or a GNU/LINUX konsole, you may see that two files has been created in that directory: “accountancy” and “accountancy.LCK”, the last is used by GnuCash for locking the first, avoiding that multiple users may write it at same time and damage it.

Remote GNUCash files

And that’s all! You can begin your work with GNUCash. However, I recommend you to do backup copies of your data often. You may put a command in the cron of your remote host to do that everyday for example.