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What’s Your Backup Plan?
Over the next few days and weeks, we’ll try to discuss what you need to plan in advance and what to take with you when a disaster occurs in your part of the world.
Part 1-the scenario
Part 2-Preparation is Key
Part 3-System Backups
Don’t think disaster ...
Back to Part 2
So why would you want to run your desktop in a VM?
There are many reasons. Most of them have to do with the way that Virtual Machines aren’t connected directly with the hardware they run on.
Virtual Hardware: By virtualizing the actual hardware away, gone are the days of search...
Vista is slow even when you get a new machine. I bought a new Dell Studio 1535 laptop last week with this config:
Core 2 Duo T8100
4GB DDR2 RAM
Intel x3100 Graphics 1280×800-eh
320GB disk
Vista Home Premium 64-but
Out of the box, this config should be FAST, VERY FAST. It isn’t. It&#...
Many of us have lots of music on our home network. I spent months converting my audio CD collection into MP3 and organizing the files.
Organization
At the time, I didn’t trust ID3 tags inside MP3 files.
My organization was/is directory based. /{genre}/{artist}/{album}/{track_no-title}.mp3
It w...
Everything is fine. No news. Both of them are just working.
VirtualBox 2.0.6 was released this week. I haven’t updated.
Xen on Ubuntu 8 LTS is working better and better. Performance is fine. Networking is fine. I have 6 VMs running on a single box. Most are 64-bit images. The list:
Zimbra
A...
Backup Schedule
Backups are boring, when done properly. They’re boring when done wrong too, but you can’t tell the difference until the day comes – and it will – that you need to recover data. There’s nothing new below, but it may be new to you.
Over the last 40 years, a...
Background for SaaS
SaaS, Software as a Service, is the rage in the computing world today. Every big company is getting into it and using Web 2.0 as the initial buzzword. I read a few IT news aggregaters every day and each of them constantly link to SaaS websites. You know them too. A short list:
...
Recently, I’ve been running IT for a small business. Backups and Disaster Recovery are critical for us AND our customers. With our background in enterprise solutions, we were limited in knowledge for low-end solutions that didn’t cost an arm AND a leg to implement. High end solutions fro...
Step 1 – backup your data.
Step 2 – recover your data as a test from a friends home or business.
The stuff you learn in step 2 is critical. We don’t backup data just to see it complete. We intend to get that data back at some point.
Do you have access to the encryption keys used d...
INAL, but as an enterprise architect, here are a few key things I can think of that law offices need to add to their existing network and computer security practices.
Truecrypt – encryption is critical. Use it on all laptops and any data transferred off site.
par2 – parity to ensure th...
rdiff-backup rocks, mostly. But there are times when it doesn’t work as expected or doesn’t work at all. Usually, the not working at all part is a cockpit error, but sometimes not.
Key rdiff-backup features
Simple 1 line backup command; rdiff-backup source target
Reverse Incremental ba...
As I ponder how to build a redundant file server that serves Linux, Solaris, VMware, Xen, VirtualBox, FreeBSD, FreeNAS, TiVo and Windows systems, a few interesting articles have come to light.
A home file server using ZFS
Snapshots into the cloud
Backups with versioning
10 Reasons You need to Co...
Enable ssh access to ESXi.
Instructions for the VM Backups using GhettoVCB script from William Lam
The GhettoVCB script. The link to the script is about 5 pgs down, but nowhere near the end of this web page.
General VMware ESXi scripting page.
Essential VCB Backups....
I came across an old article that I wrote on backups that had some clock times for the different VMs. Since that article was written, I’ve changed the backup methodology from rsync to rdiff-backup.
dms44 → 1m:52s Alfresco
crm46 → 3m:36s vTiger
xen41 → 3m:10s Typo
pki...
You’ve heard it over and over. Backup, Backup, Backup. You are magically supposed to know how to do it and make it happen. This time, I’ll show exactly how I backup my HOME directory and manage those backups with rdiff-backup.
I’ve gone into why rdiff-backup was selected previous...
Last week, I setup and configured a special desktop for the accounting system for the company. Basically, it is a Windows7 Pro desktop running under ESXi 4 that the folks responsible for accounting remote (RDP) into after connecting via VPN to the special network for it. We’re small and only a ...
Today I was going through my list of files to backup on my Linux laptop and removing temporary and cache files when I came across a directory that I didn’t recognize. The files were listed as changed with the last 3 days.
changed .purple
changed .purple/accels
changed .purple/accounts.xml
chan...
The script below was created as part of an Alfresco upgrade process and meant to be run manually. This is fairly trivial cold backup script for Alfresco 2.9b, which is a dead release tree from our friends at Alfresco. It hasn’t been tested with any other version and only backs up locally, but...
Many companies don’t really consider the bloating of server operating systems as a real problem to be addressed. This is wrong because as soon as you write any data to disk, you’ve just signed up your company to safeguard that data multiple times (3-90) for the next 3-5 years, if not long...
Sadly, the answer to which virtualization is best for Linux isn’t an easy one to answer. There are many different factors that go into the answer. While I cannot answer the question, since your needs and mine are different, I can provide a little background on what I chose and why. We wonR...
I saw a headline about stolen laptops here and thought I’d mention my methods before reading the other article.
Before Stolen Laptop
The most important stuff happens before your laptop is stolen, but you need to do it. It isn’t automatic....
If you run Ubuntu Server LTS releases like I do, you are probably wasting disk space and, because of that, backup storage because old files tied to old kernels aren’t cleaned up automatically.
After locating and cleaning up the old kernel files, I regained over 1GB of space. I was getting low ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....