Accessing your bash profile and history anywhere - via the internet

Question

I'm curious if anyone has tried to tackle the task of having non-sensitive parts of their bash (or other shell) profile made available anywhere they go.

I worked for a company for a time that did this by storing your profile on a network drive within the LAN. The effect was that when you logged in to any system or server, all your aliases would follow you everywhere. This was nice, but there are some things (aliases especially, as well as command history) that I'd like to have available on any system that I ever use.

Anyone out there tried to solve this problem for themselves? A USB key that you carry with you would be one obvious way to do this, but that won't solve the history issue. I also wonder if anyone else has tried to solve this issue using the internet as their storage medium - so that anywhere you go that has internet access (which is practically everywhere, if you tether your phone) would also give you access to all your aliases everywhere you go.

I guess the other really nice thing to have would be caching - where if you didn't have internet access, you'd still have a local copy, but it would sync up to the internet automatically whenever you made an update on a machine you were using.

Answer 1

One common way to do this are through a git or git-like repository using tools like git-home or the tools that vcs-home built.

The other common way is to use DropBox, box.net, or some other standard file sync tool to do this, and having your machine local bits source data from those.

Both solve the offline problem for you, but may not be completely awesome for, eg, history merging. Trade-offs of each vary some, and your use case dictates which hurt less.