It had to happen eventually. Regardless of how careful we all are, if we run MS-Windows-something, our PCs will get infected. One of my family members, who lives a few states away, got infected with at least 1 virus, probably a botnet and a keylogger too.
I’m working on a plan to deal with th...
One of the main reasons that people give for not performing backups is that it is too difficult. The Back In Time program solves that issue for anyone using Linux, Ubuntu, Redhat, Slackware, etc. Both Gnome and KDE version are available.
Back-In-Time uses file system hardlinks to manage snapshots ef...
The last few days, I’ve been trying to improve the manner that I copy large (2+GB) files around both locally and between systems.
I looked at 4 different programs and captured very simple stats using the time command. The programs tested were:
cp
scp
rsync
bigsync
I’d considered try...
Here’s a simple one question test for whether you have good backups or not.
Question: If any of your main hard disks started making a loud clicking sound right now does that idea freak you out or make you nervous?
If you have any answer beside, “No, bring it on” then your backups ar...
I like rdiff-backup to backup your HOME directories and Virtual Machines efficiently. Ok, that is a little understated, I LOVE rdiff-backup.
So, every 6 months or so, when it lets me down in some way, I have to recall all the good things that is actually does solve. Things like:
Efficient backup ...
In a recent study, it turns out that about 1/3rd of all companies with 1,000+ users experience data loss or data leaks The study says this number is probably low, since it is self reported. The data loss can be from stolen laptops or misplaced flash drives or non-working backups. We all know that w...
Yesterday, I took a look at the missing URL statistics for my blog and saw lots of attacks to phpMyAdmin. That’s sorta funny since I don’t use that tool and if I did, it wouldn’t be available publicly. When I say lots of phpMyAdmin attacks, I mean hundreds with every possible way o...
When you have a laptop, you expect to take it with you. When you have a portable computer, the data on it is at higher than normal risk for theft. This means you need to take steps to protect that data. In 2010, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed laws that require non-public consumer data be en...
Just got a new laptop yesterday, but I didn’t like the way that the 500GB HDD is partitioned.
Unknown (50MB)
RECOVERY (18GB)
WIN7 (whatever remained of the 500GB – over 400+GB)
Only a noob would want that partitioning because they simply don’t know any better. Why do manufactur...
Each of us use a computer for various reasons. Some just want a system that works, without any hassle. Most of us want to run specific software, work with specific file types, connect with everyone else, and possibly just do what the people around us are doing to be the same.
I’ll be as honest ...
Below are a few incidents that I’m personally aware of which impacted a few different projects. Some are from my personal desktop to production dispatching systems with 20K+ users to some that impacted a space shuttle launch data.
People like Top 10 Lists, but I could think of only 9 near disas...
I came across a short article on the Free Software Foundation building a federated social network solution and figured a few of my readers would be interested....
As some of you may know, I am a consultant, primarily with UNIX, virtualization and systems architecture. The last few days, I’ve been setting up a fairly low cost backup solution for a 100% MS-Windows shop running VMWare ESX 3.×. They have 15+ VMs and the old backup system had been shutd...
This Cyberciti.biz article explains settings and techniques to increase the default RAID re-build performance from 4k to 51k in his example. The key settings were
Increase the speed limit max by adding dev.raid.speed_limit_max = 500000 to /etc/sysctl.conf
Enable bitmaps during the rebuild and dis...
Sometimes a home or small business would like to extend a network without running any ethernet cables or using expensive power line methods. Many homes have an old WiFi router that is still working, but the new router still doesn’t get signal to all parts of the home or some devices do not supp...
Your computer guys are always talking about some coming disaster and trying to get budget for a DR, Disaster Recovery failover location. There never seems to be enough funds. Heck, you may be lucky to get backups rotated to an offsite location.
A story in Dallas Morning News, Water-main break cripple...
Cron has been around since the beginning of UNIX systems. It is a scheduler that will run programs or scripts periodically when scheduled. The scheduling can be for a specific time annually or at the same minute every hour or any period between those. The hardest part for me is recalling the specific...
What’s that saying? Some days you eat the bear and other days the bear eats you.
Or perhaps Stupid is as stupid does fits.
Ooops is something you never want to hear your system/network admin say. I’ve heard it said elsewhere and then watched as 200+ NASA servers all started rebooting. No...
In a prior article here, I outlined some important things to ensure when you’re looking for a new laptop. With the release of Windows7, some of those things aren’t necessarily as important as they were under Vista and I’ve learned some new things in my shopping for a new laptop myse...
Maintaining a computer with all the patching and updating required these days is tough. It is almost impossible to keep everything patched on the most popular OS out there, even for nerds like us. For non-computer people, it is impossible. Often, software updates have costs to get the new version too...
Over the years, I’ve been using this blog to help myself remember how to do things and to share some great tools and techniques with you. I figure it is time to recap some of those articles whether they are computer, financial/retirement, or just interesting things....
Today I was migrating a few core services from one server to another as part of the new server build project. Basically, I need to wipe the 1st physical server and reload it with a new, different OS as part of this project. Before that can be accomplished, there are a number of services that I need t...
Last week, my main laptop died taking my main xUbuntu installation with it. Ok, it really didn’t take it, since I have backups and the hard disk was fine. Further, because I run it in a VirtualBox VM, picking it up and moving it to a different physical machine was fairly simple, once I had a ma...
Last evening, I noticed that my Dell 1535 Laptop wasn’t responsive. It was recording a TV show with the Hauppauge 950Q USB QAM tuner at the time, among other things that it always does.
Below I’ll discuss symptoms, trouble shooting methods and my resolution...
So with all the equipment here, I began the server build. Refresh your memory for components by reading New Server Build – Part 1.
Part 1 – Parts is Parts
Part 2 – Build
Part 3 – Burn In and OS
Part 4 Conclusion
The Old Machine
Before beginning this build I booted the o...
