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Dropbox won't start on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04)

Dear Dropbox Community,

I have a linux box running Ubuntu 18.04. Until last week, Dropbox ran fine on it. However, something (I don't know what!) changed, and now it won't run any more. Specifically, when I execute

dropbox start

a bunch of startup messages flash up in the terminal, followed by "Dropbox isn't running!". The subsequent command "dropbox status" also shows it not to be running. When I do

dropbox start -i

after completely removing and then reinstalling dropbox, the daemon downloader window comes up, finally followed by a window with a "Start dropbox" button, but pushing that button does not actually succeed in starting dropbox.

After googling around, I have tried the following:

1. Complete reinstall

2. Executing dropboxd from ./dropbox-dist

3. Building from source. It compiles, and sudo make install appears to succeed, but I still don't see any nautilus-dropbox integration or get any synching, and dropbox status still shows "Dropbox isn't running".

4. dpkg -i from the Dropbox deb file.

None of the above has worked.

I don't know if this is related or not, but the standard apt way of installing nautilus-dropbox fails too. It complains about dropbox not being installed, even if it is actually installed! I pasted in the message below. I thought that building from source would workaround that problem, but even that doesn't actually get dropbox running.

What's especially puzzling is that dropbox was working fine on the exact same set up just last week. I don't actually know what changed!

Any help greatly appreciated,

Raj

-----

sudo apt-get install nautilus-dropbox
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
nautilus-dropbox : Depends: dropbox but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

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Comments

Daphne

Hello @raizada, I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble with this!

Can you just clarify for me, when you mentioned doing a complete reinstall, was this the advanced reinstall? If not, please try this with the steps outlined here.

Also, can you let me know if you have "Early releases" toggled on at the bottom of your account settings? This will let me know if you're using a beta version of the app. Please toggle this off if it's currently on and then try reinstall the app once more.

Let me know how it goes!

raizada

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, I did indeed do the advanced reinstall, copy and pasting from the commands on the page:

https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/advanced-reinstall

I checked, and I don't have the early-releases setting toggled on. So, I just have regular Dropbox, not any sort of beta version. I should have given that info in my original post, come to think of it. The output on my linux box of the command "dropbox version" is:

Dropbox daemon version: 105.4.651
Dropbox command-line interface version: 2020.03.04

Raj

raizada

An update: this problem is solved now. It turned out to be due to a clash with Docker. I had been running into problems mounting SMB shares, and my sys-admin looked into it. Here is what he wrote, about that SMB problem:

"The issue was that you had Docker installed. Docker by default uses the same subnet in which our datacenter is located in (172.18.0.0/16) and thus your computer was rejecting the return traffic as it came through the “wrong” interface.

I changed the default docker network to 192.168.0.0/16, this shouldn’t affect properly built docker images (if you even use docker)."

A nice side-effect of him having made this change to Docker is that my dropbox has started working again!

Raj

Daphne

Thanks for the update @raizada, I'm glad to hear that the app is working fine now!

Thanks for letting us know here too what was causing this issue for you, I'm sure that this info will be very helpful for anyone else who might be having the same issue.

If you need anything else, please feel free to give me another nudge here.

Hope you have a great rest of your week Raj!