Setting up dropbox on a headless linux system

I have been using dropbox for a while to synchronize files between different computers. It has some pretty impressive bullet points:

• Seamless syncing. You just put files in the dropbox folder, and they are automatically synchronized to your other computers. No firewall issues. In fact, the only problem I have is at work where dropbox is explicitly blocked. >:-(
  
• Easy file sharing over the internet. Just put a file in your public folder, right click, copy public link. You can even host a website on dropbox this way.
• Cross-platform. It works on linux, windows, OS X and even iPhone.
• You can access the revision history of your files so it works pretty well as an on-line backup service, even if you delete files by accident.
• It's completely free if you don't need more than 2GB storage and 30 days of revision history.

I have set up dropbox on my NAS so that I can synchronize my dropbox to a ZFS file system. This way I can combine the advantages of dropbox with the advantages of my NAS:

• I get to keep snapshots indefinitely, with disk space being my only limitation.
• I protect my data even if the dropbox service fails disastrously, e.g. because of security breach. Think file deletions being synced to all your computers.
  
• I can free space on my dropbox account by moving files on the NAS out of the dropbox folder, yet still keep them safe through my NAS snapshot+backup policy.

Dropbox is targetted at GUI environments, but can still be installed on a headless linux system as described on this wiki page. However, the wiki page did not describe how to change the dropbox folder. I needed this to point dropbox to a folder on my NAS storage pool. It took some minor reverse engineering of the dropbox settings file, but I successfully created a script to do exactly that. I've also added a link and instructions on the wiki on how to use it.