I prefer Linux and I don't mind Unity, but I'd rather use Gnome 2. Right now on my main home PC and on my work laptop I'm using the Mate edition of Linux Mint. It looks nice, it's low on resources, and it keeps out of my way. I'll leave the change for its own sake UIs for the kids.
Mint has an interesting update policy, where they stay based on 14.04 but do periodic enhancements until the next Ubuntu LTS arrives. After that they continue to supply security and stability updates until the parent LTS version reaches end of support.
I moved to the US from Canada about 10 years ago. Not only did I have no employment history, but the place I had most recently worked at in Canada for the past 5 years had gone bust. And my university degree might as well been from Uzbekistan for all the good it did me. I took the first IT job I could find, as a helpdesk Linux specialist supporting several hundred servers.
When I arrived the Linux infrastructure was in a detuned state. I started fixing what was broken and I am now one of three sr network engineers in the company. I mostly work on whatever grabs my interest, like automating various things with bash/ksh or powershell, optimizing traffic flows through our network, etc. No one bothers me about drifting in at 9 or 10 or wearing flip-flops, and if I need dollars to implement something I generally get it. I've saved the company a s**tpile of money over the years and they know it.
OTOH I work like a dog, just ridiculous hours at times. Although as we all know that is often the nature of IT.
I could make more money by changing jobs. But I basically have complete freedom now and I just don't think I'd have that anywhere else. I'm staying.
By which I mean, a distro that runs Gnome2. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS since sometime in the late 90's and I actually work as a shell programmer. I am not interested in using some new UI that is designed to run on a tablet, or that is written by some cabal of out of touch developers for their own masturbatory purposes. I want something that is easy to install that I don't have to waste a lot of time dicking around with. I assume most other people who have lives feel the same way. My 2 cents:
CentOS: A clone of Redhat Enterprise Linux. It is quite stable but does not have quite the same selection of packages as Ubuntu and its derivatives like Mint. Also, the software tends to be lag a bit behind faster churning distros like Ubuntu. But if you don't care about living on the bleeding edge, CentOS is for you.
Mint+Mate: An Ubuntu derivitave that runs the Mate UI, which is a fork of Gnome2. I'm using it now on my home PC. It's fast enough for me and I have it set up so that it looks very similar to the way I had 10.04. So far I have had zero problems with it.
In short, if you want to be on the bleeding edge and don't mind a few bugs, get Mint+Mate. Otherwise, get CentOS.
Folks get all exited about having the highest possible resolution, but that is only part of the story. I have 2 x Samsung p2770fh 27" 1920x1080 monitors. They're discontinued now, but 2 years ago I paid $280 each at the local Costco. (I would suggest buying monitors locally so they can be returned if you get dead pixels.)
Anyway, about that resolution. I'm 48 years old and my eyeballs don't work as well as they used to. I have a smokin' work-issued laptop, a Lenovo w520. I love that I can run multiple VMs at once on the thing, but I find myself squinting at it because of the higher pixel density. But at home on the 27's everything is nice and big and easy to read, even if I'm leaned back in my chair.
Otherwise the screens are nice and bright and text is very easy to read. Video looks great. For less than $600 I am a happy camper.
I don't say this to be a smart ass, so please don't take it that way, but perhaps it was that simple to you because you read it when you were 16? Mind you, my youngest child is older than that and I spent half of my life overseas in the Army, so I am neither young nor naive. Give it another shot. You may be surprised.
I did read it again about 10 years ago, 20 years after the first go-round and after picking up a BA in philosophy and literature. It was a remarkably different experience from being a 16 year-old fanboy. The book is not very well constructed and Galt's speech, nearly a book in itself, was nearly impossible to get through.
If I was going to recommend any Rand book it would be The Fountainhead, because it gets the basic message across without all the interminable editorializing.
Most of the people who criticize Atlas Shrugged haven't read it, even if they say they have. It's a great book. I second the recommendation!
I read Atlas Shrugged and to my knowledge all of Ayn Rand's other published works. In fact I thought she was the shiznit when I was 16. It all seemed so simple: these people over here are good, and those other people over there are evil. However, I have come to understand real life is a good deal more complex than that, and the binary distinctions favoured by ideologues like Rand in no way correspond with reality.
I have come to believe that any philosophy based on hate is fundamentally untenable.
I haven't bothered with offsite backups. I don't need to because I live in Florida and it's not like we ever get hurricanes or anything like that.
I have a 3ware raid card in my 10.04 box with 4 drives in raid 5, as well as an eSATA drive. I export a TB of the RAID array and a TB from the iSCSI drive via iSCSI to two 2k8 servers running in Virtualbox VMs. In the Windows VMs, DFS mirrors the data to the two mountpoints. I export those shares to a Z: drive which maps on login. I set up the free MicrosoftSyncToys powertool to mirror the local My Documents directories to the Z: drive. When SyncToy is run, and the data is backed up in two places.
I have another esata drive which mirrors my home partition every night. This is slightly complicated because I have a couple dozen virtual machines that could be running (it's usually less than 10), so what I wanted was a way to pause any VMs that might be running, back everything up, then unpause. Here's the script I wrote to do that.
#!/bin/bash # # nightly_backup: Script to pause any virtual machines that are running, # do an rsync backup, then unpause the virtual machines. Set the SRCE # and DEST variables below, as well as the USER variable. Script assumes # that $DEST is a separate partition. If this is not the case for you, # comment out the line _mount_check below. # # Sample cron entry: # 30 04 * * */usr/local/bin/nightly_backup &>>/var/log/nightly_backup.log # # Sample/etc/logrotate.d/nightly_backup file #/var/log/nightly_backup.log { # monthly # missingok # rotate 4 # compress # } # # --exclude-from file syntax: # Copy directory but not its contents: # + Cache/ # - **/Cache/** # # Do not copy (file or directory) # -.gvfs # # $Id: nightly_backup,v 1.1 2011/12/03 19:23:15 doodleboy Exp kevin $
# Function to pause or resume running virtual machines _pause-resume() {
ARG=$1
VMS=$(su - $USER -c "vboxmanage --nologo list runningvms")
if [ -n "$VMS" ]; then
printf "$VMS\n" | while read VM; do
VM=${VM%% \{*}
printf "Running $ARG on $VM...\n"
su - $USER -c "vboxmanage --nologo controlvm $VM $ARG"
done
else
printf "No VMs are running.\n"
fi }
# Abort backup if $DEST partition is not mounted _mount_check() {
if mount | grep -w "$DEST" &>/dev/null; then
printf "$DEST is mounted. Proceeding with backup.\n"
else
printf "$DEST is not mounted. Aborting backup.\n"
printf "*** $(date): Aborting nightly backup ***\n\n"
exit 1
fi }
Well, you can PXE boot LTSP over wifi if you have a wireless bridge. It's not exactly reliable though, at least it wasn't when I tried it last year.
Where I work we have 300 remote locations running LTSP on lucid. One server at each location, perhaps as many as a dozen thin clients using PXE boot. We built our own update mechanism, where the LTSP servers rsync a directory tree that contains the updates. Anything new, they run the update. If an update fails for whatever reason they send an email back to hq. It's been working fairly well for us.
LTSP enabled us to put a modern Linux desktop with Firefox, OO.org, etc, on the desktop of every underpowered thin clients that we own. This saved us from having to obsolete a big chunk of our infrastructure, probably a couple million in new hardware and depreciation costs.
We used a Clonezilla cluster to build the disk images. We wrote a config script that configured the base images (hostname, network, etc) for each location. It was a big effort but it went well.
If it's more work to save a doc in a paperless format, or if it costs more, then it isn't practical and doesn't make a lot of sense. Also, if you are all digital and a little lazy about backups, you're only a disk crash away from disaster. I like having paper copies of important stuff.
I do print most everything double-sided. This alone will save a huge amount of paper. Duplex printers aren't nearly as expensive as they used to be. I have a samsung clp-620nd, a networked color duplex laser printer. It's fantastic for the money (about $300), but I'm sure there are others out there that would work just as well.
If I do need to scan, I have a cheap HP j4550 multifunction inkjet. I never bothered buying new ink for it, but I do use the scanner. Normally I'll import into SimpleScan and output to PDF. SimpleScan works surprisingly well. I also print to PDF for receipts and the like if I want to keep a digital copy. If it's important I'll also print a copy and put it in the file cabinet.
My thought on scanning vs printing is, if it's important then do both. Don't keep anything that matters in just in one place.
We had a new IT director show up a few years ago that came around to talk to everyone about their hopes and dreams and all the rest of it. Because he cared about us as people. Shortly after that the IT department shrunk by a third.
It's Friday. I took the night off. I will be VPNing in tomorrow to do a bunch of stuff. I have to go in on Sunday to do a bunch of other stuff I can't do remotely.
I also have a 3ware card and four 1 TB drives in RAID 5 in my 10.04 desktop PC at home. Some of that space is exported via iSCSI to a couple of Windows boxes. Then I back the RAID array up with a couple of external SATA drives. My wife thinks this is excessive, but I lost a lot of data, once, nothing critical but stuff I cared about, emails and papers from college, pics of friends and family, etc. But when the drive started throwing SMART errors I thought, yup, better go pick up a new drive soon... 3 days later, it was dead.
The irony is that one of my main responsibilities at work is backups, mostly with shell scripts I wrote myself.
Many of you probably have most of your important stuff on one drive that you don't back up. At the very least, pick up an external USB drive and schedule backups for anything you care about.
If so, I'd have a look at LTSP. At work we're re-purposing a bunch of old thin clients at our branch offices to PXE boot into a modern Ubuntu server. The setup is very easy under Debian/Ubuntu and you'll get a modern OS on every screen.
It sure can be, especially the lower end stuff like Travan. Where I work we have over 300 remote sites, which used to have TR-5 tapes and drives that failed continuously. We replaced all of them with a local rsync to a different partition with snapshots going back a week, along with a remote rsync to a bank of servers with snapshots going back a month. We had to shell out some cash for the backup servers and some dev time for the scripts, but the savings from not buying tapes paid for them fairly quickly. The local rsyncs take the place of tapes, while the remotes provide secure off-site storage. We have been able to rebuild branch office servers using data off the backup servers with no data loss and minimal downtime.
Hard drives are cheap, fast and reliable. I honestly don't understand the appeal of tapes.
At work we're starting to install Ubuntu 9.04 to dualboot with XP on upper management's laptops. Ubuntu is pretty slick these days, but there is the problem of syncing files across both operating systems. We've been kicking around the idea of using a fat32 partition to keep files on, but that sucks on many levels. Reading your post, it occurs to me that unison will do exactly what we need.
I knew I came here for a reason.
My full solution would be a fanless rig, with RAID 1 for full redundancy of disks so if a hard disk fails, it doesn't take your data with it, and weekly backups to DAT tape stored off-site. Then I'd use a pair of power supplies, using a diode to prevent power from one from getting into the other, and a zener diode or 78 series linear regulators to ensure a failing supply can't overpower any one line. Then, from my little power circuit, the two power supplies would feed the one motherboard, which would be underclocked at reduced voltage. It would have the highest possible amount of RAM in it, because that would reduce the writes to the hard drives.
On the software side, I would consider hosting the DOS app on linux using an emulator such as dosemu or dosbox. The OP's dad would have an environment very similar to what he's using now. I would probably use Debian stable for both boxes, which has very long release cycles and is very stable.
With linux comes the option to replace the DAT tapes with an off-site rsync over ssh. If the main box dies, you'd be able to just swap in the backup box in a couple of minutes. If the data set isn't very large the mirror will complete in a couple of seconds. It's very easy to do:
Create a RSA public/private key pair: ssh-keygen -t rsa, press enter at the password prompts.
Copy the public key to the remote box: ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remotebox.
Have a nightly cron job to push the files: rsync -ave ssh --delete/localfiles/ remotebox:/localfiles.
For bonux points you could even throw in snapshots.
I'm backing up hundreds of partitions this way at work, each with snapshots going back a month. Tapes are slow, unreliable and expensive. I would not use them for any purpose.
Hard links use up a single inode and no more. Why mess about with diffs when you can change into a directory and see yesterday's backup? Don't like yesterdays? Change into another and see the day before that. The depth is limited by the number of inodes you have in your filesystem / number of inodes used in filesystem being backed up.
Agree completely. Disk space is cheap as dirt anyway.
I'm using rsync to mirror about 300 GB on 300+ remote partitions, with snapshots going back up to a month, depending. I have 8 fairly low-end boxes doing about 40 partitions each. Normally all boxes finish in 90-100 minutes.
Total cost for this project was less than 20k. Bids from commercial vendors for similar functionality were much, much higher.
Maybe I'm an old stick in the mud. But I've had far, far more trouble CAUSED by most of these applications than I've seen prevented.
Ain't that the truth.
I bought a couple of Dulls last year, a desktop for me and a laptop for the wife. I turned mine on long enough to ensure that it worked, then wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu. The wife wanted XP, so the first thing I installed was the Dell De-crapifier, an earlier version of the PC De-crapifier. Off came gigabytes worth of crapware, including the McAfee internet security suite, as bloated a POS as you will ever find. (Except for maybe the Norton internet security suite.)
Then I installed the free versions of AVG Antivirus, Ad-Aware and Spybot. AVG works well and is much less bloated than McAfee and Norton. Other than all the screwing around to make it stable and secure, we have never had a problem with the laptop.
However it is annoying to have to delete tons of garbage no sane person would ever want. It is annoying that Windows is so insecure. It is annoying to have to depend on Windows Update when Microsoft uses it frogmarch their users onto new software (e.g. IE 7, WGA) that has nothing to do with security. It is annoying having to go to so many different websites for software updates.
I have three linux boxes, 2 Ubuntu and one Ipcop firewall. That one Windows laptop requires more babysitting than all the linux boxes put together.
People complain about computer viruses, computer worms, computer trojans, computer instability, computer insecurity, computer crapware, computer bloatware. Et cetera.
I guess the point is that we *should* be switching our machines off whenever possible as opposed to leaving them running for no reason.
I care about saving electricity as much as the next guy (fuel efficient car, low-power lighting, recycling, etc.), but I draw the line with my computers. One of my linux boxes is a firewall, so that's up all the time. Another is my old desktop that has some extra drives in it which also I use to play with remote X, LDAP, all that other stuff. And my desktop box is always on. I walk in, I tap the spacebar, and I'm up.
One tip that will save a lot of power: ditch the CRT.
The home user isn't going to be persuaded by Linux if he/she has to wait a long time to actually get a computer into a usable state*.
Other than for power outages or new kernels, I don't ever reboot. Problem solved:-)
I've often wondered about this. Redhat pissed off many of their biggest fans, myself included, with the move to commercial Redhat and free (beta) Fedora. Like many other linux users, I skipped Fedora entirely in favor of CentOS and Ubuntu, etc.
Redhat has stockholders to answer to and did what they thought was the best thing at the time to maximize shareholder value. They're still making money, which is their primary concern, but according to the page rankings on distrowatch.com (not scientific, I know) Redhat/Fedora is now less popular than either Ubuntu or OpenSUSE.
I wonder if Redhat had a do-over if they'd still commercialize Redhat they way they did.
Firestarter and ipcop are completely different animals. Firestarter is a pretty cool firewall GUI for linux. It's pretty and easy to use. You can see the hits in real time, make firewall rules on the fly, etc., all without having to go anywhere near the iptables manpage. I would not hesitate to use firestarter on a laptop if I was travelling.
But for home or business use, I would definitely use a dedicated solution like ipcop. I have two internal networks, one wireless for the laptops and another for my linux boxes. The ipcop machine (an old k6/450, total overkill) protects all the computers in the house, provides caching dns, dhcp, ntp, IDS, transparent proxy, etc, for both networks. It doesn't solve every firewall problem, but it's very powerful, secure, and easy to configure.
There are millions of spare pcs lying around out there. I think even non-linux users should be able to install ipcop on some of them.
I had a lot of ATI related issues myself (self-inflicted most likely) but I eventually got everything working.
I'm not even sure why I upgraded to Edgy, since I was having no real problems with Dapper. Anyway vi/etc/sources.list and:%s/dapper/edgy/g, then apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade and went to bed. I woke up in the morning with a completely broken system. I think there were ~600 packages total to be upgraded. It got through installing 300-ish, spit out a lot of X related errors and died. I had installed a lot of stuff with Automatix and Easyubuntu and also was using ATI's drivers for my X300 video card. Rather than wasting hours de-hosing all that stuff I downloaded the 64-bit Edgy iso and did a clean install on the / partition.
Except I couldn't get the installer to run, despite trying many different permutations/combinations. So I downloaded the Alternatives CD and did a text install. That finally worked. But X Firefox refreshes were so slow with the stock Vesa driver that it reminded me of my old Pentium 200. So, I had apt get the fglrx X driver, various and sundry restricted modules, ran aticonfig and rebooted.
Now I finally have something that worked as well as Dapper. I have Firefox 2 and the latest versions of everything, but they're not *that* much better. Still I honestly don't care that much. We have 300+ redhat servers at work and I know it inside out. I could have had CentOS up in a flash, but I'm using Ubuntu at home partly because it's new and different. I like learning how to do things, even if I know I could do them blindfolded with another distribution.
What I learned was this: if I install a lot of third-party stuff, like proprietary X drivers (stupid ATI!) and various goodies through Automatix and EasyUbuntu, I should expect to do a clean text-mode install instead of an upgrade.
Excuse me for a second.
So, Ubuntu doesn't cost a dime.
Does it: Play DVDs out of the box? Play MP3s out of the box? Work with Microsoft / Apple DRM music files out of the box?
No. It doesn't. For something to be even considered useful, it needs to be able to do the above three things. Or else it's WORTHLESS IMO. Sure, you can bring up Ubuntu, find some site, download XMMS with the MP3 plugins.
http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org./ Takes a couple minutes to run, installs pretty much every codec out there along with apps to use them with. It's crushingly difficult. And so hard to find too--it took almost a whole minute to find the link on the Ubuntulinux wiki.
While I understand how much better Linux is because of security, usability is FAR less than what people are willing to admit. Linux has a LOOOOONG way to go before it's ready for prime time on the desktop.
Which linux distributions have you tried? How much have you used them? Because I'm sensing a lack of familiarity. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Stick with Windows if you're more comfortable. Just don't assume that what's right for you is right for everyone.
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I prefer Linux and I don't mind Unity, but I'd rather use Gnome 2. Right now on my main home PC and on my work laptop I'm using the Mate edition of Linux Mint. It looks nice, it's low on resources, and it keeps out of my way. I'll leave the change for its own sake UIs for the kids.
Mint has an interesting update policy, where they stay based on 14.04 but do periodic enhancements until the next Ubuntu LTS arrives. After that they continue to supply security and stability updates until the parent LTS version reaches end of support.
I moved to the US from Canada about 10 years ago. Not only did I have no employment history, but the place I had most recently worked at in Canada for the past 5 years had gone bust. And my university degree might as well been from Uzbekistan for all the good it did me. I took the first IT job I could find, as a helpdesk Linux specialist supporting several hundred servers.
When I arrived the Linux infrastructure was in a detuned state. I started fixing what was broken and I am now one of three sr network engineers in the company. I mostly work on whatever grabs my interest, like automating various things with bash/ksh or powershell, optimizing traffic flows through our network, etc. No one bothers me about drifting in at 9 or 10 or wearing flip-flops, and if I need dollars to implement something I generally get it. I've saved the company a s**tpile of money over the years and they know it.
OTOH I work like a dog, just ridiculous hours at times. Although as we all know that is often the nature of IT.
I could make more money by changing jobs. But I basically have complete freedom now and I just don't think I'd have that anywhere else. I'm staying.
Home FreeNAS box...
~ # telnet 192.168.7.7 49152 /PSBlock
Trying 192.168.7.7...
Connected to 192.168.7.7.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET
adminADMINmypasswordTTmyuseridmypassword4
By which I mean, a distro that runs Gnome2. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS since sometime in the late 90's and I actually work as a shell programmer. I am not interested in using some new UI that is designed to run on a tablet, or that is written by some cabal of out of touch developers for their own masturbatory purposes. I want something that is easy to install that I don't have to waste a lot of time dicking around with. I assume most other people who have lives feel the same way. My 2 cents:
CentOS: A clone of Redhat Enterprise Linux. It is quite stable but does not have quite the same selection of packages as Ubuntu and its derivatives like Mint. Also, the software tends to be lag a bit behind faster churning distros like Ubuntu. But if you don't care about living on the bleeding edge, CentOS is for you.
Mint+Mate: An Ubuntu derivitave that runs the Mate UI, which is a fork of Gnome2. I'm using it now on my home PC. It's fast enough for me and I have it set up so that it looks very similar to the way I had 10.04. So far I have had zero problems with it.
In short, if you want to be on the bleeding edge and don't mind a few bugs, get Mint+Mate. Otherwise, get CentOS.
Folks get all exited about having the highest possible resolution, but that is only part of the story. I have 2 x Samsung p2770fh 27" 1920x1080 monitors. They're discontinued now, but 2 years ago I paid $280 each at the local Costco. (I would suggest buying monitors locally so they can be returned if you get dead pixels.)
Anyway, about that resolution. I'm 48 years old and my eyeballs don't work as well as they used to. I have a smokin' work-issued laptop, a Lenovo w520. I love that I can run multiple VMs at once on the thing, but I find myself squinting at it because of the higher pixel density. But at home on the 27's everything is nice and big and easy to read, even if I'm leaned back in my chair.
Otherwise the screens are nice and bright and text is very easy to read. Video looks great. For less than $600 I am a happy camper.
I don't say this to be a smart ass, so please don't take it that way, but perhaps it was that simple to you because you read it when you were 16? Mind you, my youngest child is older than that and I spent half of my life overseas in the Army, so I am neither young nor naive. Give it another shot. You may be surprised.
I did read it again about 10 years ago, 20 years after the first go-round and after picking up a BA in philosophy and literature. It was a remarkably different experience from being a 16 year-old fanboy. The book is not very well constructed and Galt's speech, nearly a book in itself, was nearly impossible to get through.
If I was going to recommend any Rand book it would be The Fountainhead, because it gets the basic message across without all the interminable editorializing.
Most of the people who criticize Atlas Shrugged haven't read it, even if they say they have. It's a great book. I second the recommendation!
I read Atlas Shrugged and to my knowledge all of Ayn Rand's other published works. In fact I thought she was the shiznit when I was 16. It all seemed so simple: these people over here are good, and those other people over there are evil. However, I have come to understand real life is a good deal more complex than that, and the binary distinctions favoured by ideologues like Rand in no way correspond with reality.
I have come to believe that any philosophy based on hate is fundamentally untenable.
I haven't bothered with offsite backups. I don't need to because I live in Florida and it's not like we ever get hurricanes or anything like that.
I have a 3ware raid card in my 10.04 box with 4 drives in raid 5, as well as an eSATA drive. I export a TB of the RAID array and a TB from the iSCSI drive via iSCSI to two 2k8 servers running in Virtualbox VMs. In the Windows VMs, DFS mirrors the data to the two mountpoints. I export those shares to a Z: drive which maps on login. I set up the free MicrosoftSyncToys powertool to mirror the local My Documents directories to the Z: drive. When SyncToy is run, and the data is backed up in two places.
I have another esata drive which mirrors my home partition every night. This is slightly complicated because I have a couple dozen virtual machines that could be running (it's usually less than 10), so what I wanted was a way to pause any VMs that might be running, back everything up, then unpause. Here's the script I wrote to do that.
#!/bin/bash /usr/local/bin/nightly_backup &>>/var/log/nightly_backup.log /etc/logrotate.d/nightly_backup file /var/log/nightly_backup.log { .gvfs
#
# nightly_backup: Script to pause any virtual machines that are running,
# do an rsync backup, then unpause the virtual machines. Set the SRCE
# and DEST variables below, as well as the USER variable. Script assumes
# that $DEST is a separate partition. If this is not the case for you,
# comment out the line _mount_check below.
#
# Sample cron entry:
# 30 04 * * *
#
# Sample
#
# monthly
# missingok
# rotate 4
# compress
# }
#
# --exclude-from file syntax:
# Copy directory but not its contents:
# + Cache/
# - **/Cache/**
#
# Do not copy (file or directory)
# -
#
# $Id: nightly_backup,v 1.1 2011/12/03 19:23:15 doodleboy Exp kevin $
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin
USER=doodleboy
SRCE=/home
DEST=/archive
ARGS="-aHS --delete --stats --exclude-from=/usr/local/bin/rsync_exclude"
# Function to pause or resume running virtual machines
_pause-resume() {
ARG=$1
VMS=$(su - $USER -c "vboxmanage --nologo list runningvms")
if [ -n "$VMS" ]; then
printf "$VMS\n" | while read VM; do
VM=${VM%% \{*}
printf "Running $ARG on $VM...\n"
su - $USER -c "vboxmanage --nologo controlvm $VM $ARG"
done
else
printf "No VMs are running.\n"
fi
}
# Abort backup if $DEST partition is not mounted
_mount_check() {
if mount | grep -w "$DEST" &>/dev/null; then
printf "$DEST is mounted. Proceeding with backup.\n"
else
printf "$DEST is not mounted. Aborting backup.\n"
printf "*** $(date): Aborting nightly backup ***\n\n"
exit 1
fi
}
# Start banner
printf "*** $(date): Starting nightly backup ***\n"
# Make sure $DEST is mounted
# Comment out _mount_check if $DEST is not a partition
_mount_check
# Pause virtual machines
_pause-resume pause
# Flush pending writes
sync
sleep 3
#
Well, you can PXE boot LTSP over wifi if you have a wireless bridge. It's not exactly reliable though, at least it wasn't when I tried it last year.
Where I work we have 300 remote locations running LTSP on lucid. One server at each location, perhaps as many as a dozen thin clients using PXE boot. We built our own update mechanism, where the LTSP servers rsync a directory tree that contains the updates. Anything new, they run the update. If an update fails for whatever reason they send an email back to hq. It's been working fairly well for us.
LTSP enabled us to put a modern Linux desktop with Firefox, OO.org, etc, on the desktop of every underpowered thin clients that we own. This saved us from having to obsolete a big chunk of our infrastructure, probably a couple million in new hardware and depreciation costs.
We used a Clonezilla cluster to build the disk images. We wrote a config script that configured the base images (hostname, network, etc) for each location. It was a big effort but it went well.
If it's more work to save a doc in a paperless format, or if it costs more, then it isn't practical and doesn't make a lot of sense. Also, if you are all digital and a little lazy about backups, you're only a disk crash away from disaster. I like having paper copies of important stuff.
I do print most everything double-sided. This alone will save a huge amount of paper. Duplex printers aren't nearly as expensive as they used to be. I have a samsung clp-620nd, a networked color duplex laser printer. It's fantastic for the money (about $300), but I'm sure there are others out there that would work just as well.
If I do need to scan, I have a cheap HP j4550 multifunction inkjet. I never bothered buying new ink for it, but I do use the scanner. Normally I'll import into SimpleScan and output to PDF. SimpleScan works surprisingly well. I also print to PDF for receipts and the like if I want to keep a digital copy. If it's important I'll also print a copy and put it in the file cabinet.
My thought on scanning vs printing is, if it's important then do both. Don't keep anything that matters in just in one place.
We had a new IT director show up a few years ago that came around to talk to everyone about their hopes and dreams and all the rest of it. Because he cared about us as people. Shortly after that the IT department shrunk by a third.
It's Friday. I took the night off. I will be VPNing in tomorrow to do a bunch of stuff. I have to go in on Sunday to do a bunch of other stuff I can't do remotely.
Fuck this shit.
I also have a 3ware card and four 1 TB drives in RAID 5 in my 10.04 desktop PC at home. Some of that space is exported via iSCSI to a couple of Windows boxes. Then I back the RAID array up with a couple of external SATA drives. My wife thinks this is excessive, but I lost a lot of data, once, nothing critical but stuff I cared about, emails and papers from college, pics of friends and family, etc. But when the drive started throwing SMART errors I thought, yup, better go pick up a new drive soon... 3 days later, it was dead.
The irony is that one of my main responsibilities at work is backups, mostly with shell scripts I wrote myself.
Many of you probably have most of your important stuff on one drive that you don't back up. At the very least, pick up an external USB drive and schedule backups for anything you care about.
If so, I'd have a look at LTSP. At work we're re-purposing a bunch of old thin clients at our branch offices to PXE boot into a modern Ubuntu server. The setup is very easy under Debian/Ubuntu and you'll get a modern OS on every screen.
It sure can be, especially the lower end stuff like Travan. Where I work we have over 300 remote sites, which used to have TR-5 tapes and drives that failed continuously. We replaced all of them with a local rsync to a different partition with snapshots going back a week, along with a remote rsync to a bank of servers with snapshots going back a month. We had to shell out some cash for the backup servers and some dev time for the scripts, but the savings from not buying tapes paid for them fairly quickly. The local rsyncs take the place of tapes, while the remotes provide secure off-site storage. We have been able to rebuild branch office servers using data off the backup servers with no data loss and minimal downtime. Hard drives are cheap, fast and reliable. I honestly don't understand the appeal of tapes.
At work we're starting to install Ubuntu 9.04 to dualboot with XP on upper management's laptops. Ubuntu is pretty slick these days, but there is the problem of syncing files across both operating systems. We've been kicking around the idea of using a fat32 partition to keep files on, but that sucks on many levels. Reading your post, it occurs to me that unison will do exactly what we need. I knew I came here for a reason.
On the software side, I would consider hosting the DOS app on linux using an emulator such as dosemu or dosbox. The OP's dad would have an environment very similar to what he's using now. I would probably use Debian stable for both boxes, which has very long release cycles and is very stable.
With linux comes the option to replace the DAT tapes with an off-site rsync over ssh. If the main box dies, you'd be able to just swap in the backup box in a couple of minutes. If the data set isn't very large the mirror will complete in a couple of seconds. It's very easy to do:
Create a RSA public/private key pair: ssh-keygen -t rsa, press enter at the password prompts.
Copy the public key to the remote box: ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remotebox.
Have a nightly cron job to push the files: rsync -ave ssh --delete /localfiles/ remotebox:/localfiles.
For bonux points you could even throw in snapshots.
I'm backing up hundreds of partitions this way at work, each with snapshots going back a month. Tapes are slow, unreliable and expensive. I would not use them for any purpose.
Hard links use up a single inode and no more. Why mess about with diffs when you can change into a directory and see yesterday's backup? Don't like yesterdays? Change into another and see the day before that. The depth is limited by the number of inodes you have in your filesystem / number of inodes used in filesystem being backed up.
Agree completely. Disk space is cheap as dirt anyway.
I'm using rsync to mirror about 300 GB on 300+ remote partitions, with snapshots going back up to a month, depending. I have 8 fairly low-end boxes doing about 40 partitions each. Normally all boxes finish in 90-100 minutes.
Total cost for this project was less than 20k. Bids from commercial vendors for similar functionality were much, much higher.
root@ipcop's password:
09:41:04 up 240 days, 7:07, 1 user, load average: 0.12, 0.07, 0.05
That it's caused by the DRM subsystem.
Ain't that the truth.
I bought a couple of Dulls last year, a desktop for me and a laptop for the wife. I turned mine on long enough to ensure that it worked, then wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu. The wife wanted XP, so the first thing I installed was the Dell De-crapifier, an earlier version of the PC De-crapifier. Off came gigabytes worth of crapware, including the McAfee internet security suite, as bloated a POS as you will ever find. (Except for maybe the Norton internet security suite.)
Then I installed the free versions of AVG Antivirus, Ad-Aware and Spybot. AVG works well and is much less bloated than McAfee and Norton. Other than all the screwing around to make it stable and secure, we have never had a problem with the laptop.
However it is annoying to have to delete tons of garbage no sane person would ever want. It is annoying that Windows is so insecure. It is annoying to have to depend on Windows Update when Microsoft uses it frogmarch their users onto new software (e.g. IE 7, WGA) that has nothing to do with security. It is annoying having to go to so many different websites for software updates.
I have three linux boxes, 2 Ubuntu and one Ipcop firewall. That one Windows laptop requires more babysitting than all the linux boxes put together.
People complain about computer viruses, computer worms, computer trojans, computer instability, computer insecurity, computer crapware, computer bloatware. Et cetera.
To that I say
One tip that will save a lot of power: ditch the CRT.
Other than for power outages or new kernels, I don't ever reboot. Problem solvedI've often wondered about this. Redhat pissed off many of their biggest fans, myself included, with the move to commercial Redhat and free (beta) Fedora. Like many other linux users, I skipped Fedora entirely in favor of CentOS and Ubuntu, etc.
Redhat has stockholders to answer to and did what they thought was the best thing at the time to maximize shareholder value. They're still making money, which is their primary concern, but according to the page rankings on distrowatch.com (not scientific, I know) Redhat/Fedora is now less popular than either Ubuntu or OpenSUSE.
I wonder if Redhat had a do-over if they'd still commercialize Redhat they way they did.
Firestarter and ipcop are completely different animals. Firestarter is a pretty cool firewall GUI for linux. It's pretty and easy to use. You can see the hits in real time, make firewall rules on the fly, etc., all without having to go anywhere near the iptables manpage. I would not hesitate to use firestarter on a laptop if I was travelling.
But for home or business use, I would definitely use a dedicated solution like ipcop. I have two internal networks, one wireless for the laptops and another for my linux boxes. The ipcop machine (an old k6/450, total overkill) protects all the computers in the house, provides caching dns, dhcp, ntp, IDS, transparent proxy, etc, for both networks. It doesn't solve every firewall problem, but it's very powerful, secure, and easy to configure.
There are millions of spare pcs lying around out there. I think even non-linux users should be able to install ipcop on some of them.
I'm not even sure why I upgraded to Edgy, since I was having no real problems with Dapper. Anyway vi /etc/sources.list and :%s/dapper/edgy/g, then apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade and went to bed. I woke up in the morning with a completely broken system. I think there were ~600 packages total to be upgraded. It got through installing 300-ish, spit out a lot of X related errors and died. I had installed a lot of stuff with Automatix and Easyubuntu and also was using ATI's drivers for my X300 video card. Rather than wasting hours de-hosing all that stuff I downloaded the 64-bit Edgy iso and did a clean install on the / partition.
Except I couldn't get the installer to run, despite trying many different permutations/combinations. So I downloaded the Alternatives CD and did a text install. That finally worked. But X Firefox refreshes were so slow with the stock Vesa driver that it reminded me of my old Pentium 200. So, I had apt get the fglrx X driver, various and sundry restricted modules, ran aticonfig and rebooted.
Now I finally have something that worked as well as Dapper. I have Firefox 2 and the latest versions of everything, but they're not *that* much better. Still I honestly don't care that much. We have 300+ redhat servers at work and I know it inside out. I could have had CentOS up in a flash, but I'm using Ubuntu at home partly because it's new and different. I like learning how to do things, even if I know I could do them blindfolded with another distribution.
What I learned was this: if I install a lot of third-party stuff, like proprietary X drivers (stupid ATI!) and various goodies through Automatix and EasyUbuntu, I should expect to do a clean text-mode install instead of an upgrade.
http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org./ Takes a couple minutes to run, installs pretty much every codec out there along with apps to use them with. It's crushingly difficult. And so hard to find too--it took almost a whole minute to find the link on the Ubuntulinux wiki.
Which linux distributions have you tried? How much have you used them? Because I'm sensing a lack of familiarity. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Stick with Windows if you're more comfortable. Just don't assume that what's right for you is right for everyone.