URL to link account in Linux does not work

[muxxum]

I'm trying to install in Linux. I have the app installed but when it brings up the URL to link your account to the computer the URL is not valid. It does not work.  I can relaunch dropbox and it brings up another invalid URL.

There is also no options I can find other than this invalid URL to link the account and get dropbox working.

Where can I get a valid URL to link my computer?  How can I make this work?  Or do I need to find another service?

[Walter]

Hi there @muxxum, sorry to hear you're having issues with this.

Can you please let me know if you're getting a specific error and send us a screenshot so that we can have a visual too?

Also, if you're on the Basic plan, have you ensured that you have no more than 3 devices connected to your account as you might be hitting the device limit?

Let me know and we'll take it from there. 

[Здравко]

Hi @muxxum,

Take a look on another thread. It may helps to you too. 😉

Good luck.

[muxxum]

Having 3 devices linked turned out the be the problem. I didn't think to check that because the page that was coming up just said invalid URL. It gave absolutely no indication of there being any other cause so I was thinking something was going wrong with the software rather than it being too many devices. Without a meaningful error it meant nothing other than dropbox wasn't working.

I don't have a screenshot of the page because it worked after I removed a device. But it was a generic picture on the page with the text under it saying, "Invalid URL. Please check your client for a new one."

I did a google search and I found a picture of the page someone else posted. It's a quite terrible error message given what the problem was.

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/39374iE4AAD4CAE8CF03FA/image-size/large?v=...

A meaningful error would go a long way to helping customers, free tier or paid.

[andy47]

I am having this problem as well, and I am not on basic.  I have at least 10 computers synced to my account, a mixture of Mac OS, Windows and mostly Linux.  I have never had any problems until the last few days, in which problems have been rampant in Linux.  Prior dropbox installations have trouble syncing, and new installations return a bad URL when trying to connect to the account for the initial sync.  I have tried this at least 5 times using different distros (Mint, Ubuntu, Debian) and the result is the same.  I see from other recent messages online that its happening to people regardless of flatpak or nautilus installs.  This seems like a massive error and that it has been lingering for a week without a fix is astonishing.  Years of using dropbox headache free, and now it won't install! 

The error simply states "

Error

Invalid URL. Please check your client for a new one."

[jribeiro]

Same problem here.

[BKV]

Thanks for the reply but obviously it's not the right one. More and more people are reporting this issue. FYI in my case it's occurring on a freshly reformatted computer with Ubuntu as OS and it's only the second device connected under this account. Furthermore, your website is extremely slow; not sure if it is linked but it shows there are issues at your end. Thanks to resolve and notify when done.

[7OD]

Same here.

I'm in the basic plan and (now) on a fresh installation of Ubuntu-MATE.
Dropbox downloaded an installation into ~/.dropbox-dist sucessfully.
Starting the client did open a browser pointing to `https://www.dropbox.com/cli_link_nonce?nonce=xxxxxxxxxx`
But each time the message was: "Ungültige URL. Bitte finden Sie die Korrekte heraus." (meaning: Invalid URL. Please find out the correct one.)

I already had unlinked all devices, but one.
So this is not the problem.

Finally, by incident, I managed to link my new installation.
After multiple reboots and multiple refreshes of the browser when saying "invalid URL" the Dropbox web UI came up.

It seems to me that there is a race condition, the generated URL is not valid yet when the browser opens.
This would correlate to the experience of a slow server stated by other users. Or maybe the time window of the generated nonce is to little.

Please:
* Could you pass this on to your development team
* Consider Linux as a still important platform

Best regards

[jcator]

I have the url error constantly now. I have one laptop, before the url error it keeps detecting the same laptop randomly as new device when the URL does work.

[BKV]

UPDATE

Today after starting my computer where it asks again to connect, I was directed to a page explaining the 3-device limit and proposing to unconnect / suign-out the older devices. I did and now it works fine.