Very true indeed, BackupPC really is a one-stop solution for doing sensible backups of any number of hosts (local or remote) over a long time. The learning curve isn't as steep anymore, since they introduced a more capable web interface.
I also have yet to see another program that does what BackupPC does any faster.
Get an account on rsync.net and have all of your 15 machines rsync their data there. Might take long the first time, but from there on it will just fly. You could even use a trivial cronjob to do it for you...
Best of all, rsync.net will let you access your data through WebDAVs, so it's like you can take your data with you anywhere you like, as long as you can get online somehow.
In addition, most of the sites explicitly disallow sharing your account information (especially passwords) in their terms of service. Maybe you'll get the job, but you'll lose your accounts...
almost nothing you buy lasts forever, so your right to listen to (or watch) what you download should not last forever.
Well, then it's time those companies took a long hard look at all the records, CDs and DVDs people bought before DRM was introduced, dating back some 50 years in not so rare cases. Those media were advertised to last at least 10 to 20 years, most of them do longer by far.
If "nothing lasts forever" is the new tune the publishers are singing, that's fine, as long as prices drop considerably to reflect the newly degraded longevity of said media. You can't expect people to pay the same high prices and ask them to accept an inferior product without your sales figures plummeting.
I think Ubuntu is way overhyped, and I'm having a lot of issues getting it to do even basic things without hours of Internet research and command line wrangling.
I just realized this yesterday when I had to deal with Ubuntu on a strange brand laptop. The Gnome WIFI manager wouldn't recognize any networks for the life of me, even though I could access them on the 2 other netbooks I brought with me for testing.
After many hours of frustration, I decided to give the new Mandriva a shot. What can I say, it worked like a charm! Everything was recognized, the resolution was correct, the nVidia driver was installed already, the wireless network was found, the networked printer was autodetected, etc. etc. The list of configuration items where Ubuntu still fails today and Mandriva excels goes on and on!
Don't get me wrong, I love what Shuttleworth is doing for the Linux community and Ubuntu, but man, there sure are moments where Ubuntu looks bad compared to the competition. So for me, it's rightfully on that list.
It's plenty fast for most tasks and can utilize a Gigabit link up to 30% in a RAID6 setup.
The older models (non-Pentium and non-Atom) really were slow. So slow in fact that one had to wonder why anybody would want to use anything other than JBOD, RAID0 or RAID1 on them. These new NAS boxes, however, have come a long way and are certainly suitable SMB/SOHO use.
Anyway, in a situation like yours, I'd have opted for a proper 4+ drive NAS like the ones offered by Qnap, Synology, etc.
Cooling is not an issue with those cases, since they're designed with cool drives in mind from the beginning. The air flow is optimized and driven by a large-diameter slow-spinning fan in the back.
As for cool drives, I found the Western Digital RE2 GP series to be really good. They spin slower than other drives, but they also stay a lot cooler and thus consume only a fraction of the power other drives do. In addition, they're designed for 24/7 operation, so you probably won't have them die on you after a few months of usage.
While that certainly is a feasible solution, I'd rather get a proper NAS from Qnap or Synology instead. They do all the work for you and offer lots of additional benefits, staying cool and being reliable among the most important ones. Not to mention iSCSI, uPNP and advanced RAID and SMART configurations that let you know when (or before) something's wrong with your disks.
If I recall correctly, BtrFS also does checksumming of individual files and has become available in the latest kernel as well, so it's easier to use with Linux.
I wouldn't use it on a server just yet, since there might still be some changes to the ondisk format.
Or just replace an old drive with a new drive periodically so that no drive is ever more than two years old.
This is exactly what I've been doing for the past few years. Every 1 - 2 years, I buy whatever disk has the best GB/$ ratio and is bigger than my currently smallest drive. This gets integrated into the array, ensuring that all checksums are actually rechecked. In the process, I grow the RAID array to make use of the new space, thus keeping track of Moore's law in a way.
The old drive still gets used for experimentation purposes in other PCs or is sold off on your favourite auction site after intesive scrubbing with dd.
I'm hoping that I can do a one monthly level 0 to the NAS, and then keep 1 months worth of incremental backups after that.
Since, as you say there's nothing to protect us from the "dumb user armed with a Delete key" beyond that 1 month safe window, I've amending the QA/QC and staff manuals to basically explain to the management team that if a user does this, we're screwed, but this is all we can afford so you have to live with that.
Well, you might want to have a closer look at software like BackupPC (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/), which basically does backups using rsync or SMB and keeps versions of all files back as long as you like. All you need is a moderately powered PC running Linux and a few disks.
It's a very space efficient system, which even allows you to dump the stored backups to DVD or another portable harddisk for offsite keeping.
There really aren't that many filesystems around that meet your criteria. The only one I'm aware of acutally is Ext3 and IIRC that only supports offline shrinking. Other alternatives would be VxFS, Ext4 and maybe BTRFS, but I'm not too sure about their kernel integration.
I really have no idea how the parent got modded (Score:4, Funny), it should rather be (Score:5, Insightful)!
I couldn't agree more with the point he's making. Most of the CIOs I know would rather go blind-foldedly with a Microsoft solution than making an informed choice about which system would suit them best.
Why do people continue to insist that PC gaming, which is only done by a small percentage of computer users, is so important to Linux. It would be a simple matter to capture 90% of the PC market without ever having a single 3d driver, let alone anything more than the casual games Linux already has.
That's absolutely right. I used to play games on PC for a long time, but somewhere down the road I got tired of destabilizing an otherwise solid OS installation with tons of games and their dependencies, in addition to always having to keeping up with the latest hardware to get acceptable frame rates. This was the point where I switched all of my gaming to consoles (PS 1-3, Wii), which so far saved me a lot of money, time and hassle, not to mention the overall better game experience thanks to playing on a HDready TV set.
Back to the point, I think gaming on Linux is the least of all things to worry about. If Linux can become the default choice for standard office work as well as on mobile devices, hardware vendors and game programmers alike will become much more inclined to develop for Linux.
Well, I don't know. Although I'm aware that there are more modern tools like aptitude, synaptic et al, I still use dselect on Debian and Ubuntu systems today.
Agreed, it doesn't win any design prizes, but it certainly works really well and predictably, which is what I'm looking for when working on systems a few hundred kilmeters away.
[...] all Europe has to do is look in Europe, specifically Switzerland. All able bodied males are required to have a firearm yet crimes used with firearms are lower than in the US [...] That's because they have to take the gun home with them after leaving service, but the ammo has to stay in the barracks.
Slashdot Mirror
Good thinking, that's why Microsoft won't be able to register a trademark for "Windows". No, wait... Uhm... ;)
Indeed, those small games really are lots of fun. Recently, I've even found myself enjoying them more than the "big" games I paid lots of money for.
If online backup is an option, why not try http://www.wuala.com/ ?
Very true indeed, BackupPC really is a one-stop solution for doing sensible backups of any number of hosts (local or remote) over a long time. The learning curve isn't as steep anymore, since they introduced a more capable web interface.
I also have yet to see another program that does what BackupPC does any faster.
Get an account on rsync.net and have all of your 15 machines rsync their data there. Might take long the first time, but from there on it will just fly. You could even use a trivial cronjob to do it for you...
Best of all, rsync.net will let you access your data through WebDAVs, so it's like you can take your data with you anywhere you like, as long as you can get online somehow.
On a side note, it's a bit unfortunate that Google Gears (along with a number of other add-ons) isn't compatible with FF3.5, yet. :(
In addition, most of the sites explicitly disallow sharing your account information (especially passwords) in their terms of service. Maybe you'll get the job, but you'll lose your accounts...
That's the best proposal I've heard in a long time!
almost nothing you buy lasts forever, so your right to listen to (or watch) what you download should not last forever.
Well, then it's time those companies took a long hard look at all the records, CDs and DVDs people bought before DRM was introduced, dating back some 50 years in not so rare cases. Those media were advertised to last at least 10 to 20 years, most of them do longer by far.
If "nothing lasts forever" is the new tune the publishers are singing, that's fine, as long as prices drop considerably to reflect the newly degraded longevity of said media. You can't expect people to pay the same high prices and ask them to accept an inferior product without your sales figures plummeting.
In addition to buying a cheap system being the better solution, the software would cost around 200$ as well!
I just realized this yesterday when I had to deal with Ubuntu on a strange brand laptop. The Gnome WIFI manager wouldn't recognize any networks for the life of me, even though I could access them on the 2 other netbooks I brought with me for testing.
After many hours of frustration, I decided to give the new Mandriva a shot. What can I say, it worked like a charm! Everything was recognized, the resolution was correct, the nVidia driver was installed already, the wireless network was found, the networked printer was autodetected, etc. etc. The list of configuration items where Ubuntu still fails today and Mandriva excels goes on and on!
Don't get me wrong, I love what Shuttleworth is doing for the Linux community and Ubuntu, but man, there sure are moments where Ubuntu looks bad compared to the competition. So for me, it's rightfully on that list.
I'd say this baby can pull it off all by itself, if you equip it with 2TB drives:
http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=109
It also looks like it's got the horsepower to dish out all that data at acceptable speeds. ;)
Hmm, try one of these:
http://www.wuala.com/
http://www.rsync.net/
Well, then it's time for you to take a closer look at this baby for example: http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=104
It's plenty fast for most tasks and can utilize a Gigabit link up to 30% in a RAID6 setup.
The older models (non-Pentium and non-Atom) really were slow. So slow in fact that one had to wonder why anybody would want to use anything other than JBOD, RAID0 or RAID1 on them. These new NAS boxes, however, have come a long way and are certainly suitable SMB/SOHO use.
That's some collection you have there...
Anyway, in a situation like yours, I'd have opted for a proper 4+ drive NAS like the ones offered by Qnap, Synology, etc.
Cooling is not an issue with those cases, since they're designed with cool drives in mind from the beginning. The air flow is optimized and driven by a large-diameter slow-spinning fan in the back.
As for cool drives, I found the Western Digital RE2 GP series to be really good. They spin slower than other drives, but they also stay a lot cooler and thus consume only a fraction of the power other drives do. In addition, they're designed for 24/7 operation, so you probably won't have them die on you after a few months of usage.
While that certainly is a feasible solution, I'd rather get a proper NAS from Qnap or Synology instead. They do all the work for you and offer lots of additional benefits, staying cool and being reliable among the most important ones. Not to mention iSCSI, uPNP and advanced RAID and SMART configurations that let you know when (or before) something's wrong with your disks.
If I recall correctly, BtrFS also does checksumming of individual files and has become available in the latest kernel as well, so it's easier to use with Linux.
I wouldn't use it on a server just yet, since there might still be some changes to the ondisk format.
This is exactly what I've been doing for the past few years. Every 1 - 2 years, I buy whatever disk has the best GB/$ ratio and is bigger than my currently smallest drive. This gets integrated into the array, ensuring that all checksums are actually rechecked. In the process, I grow the RAID array to make use of the new space, thus keeping track of Moore's law in a way.
The old drive still gets used for experimentation purposes in other PCs or is sold off on your favourite auction site after intesive scrubbing with dd.
Well, you might want to have a closer look at software like BackupPC (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/), which basically does backups using rsync or SMB and keeps versions of all files back as long as you like. All you need is a moderately powered PC running Linux and a few disks.
It's a very space efficient system, which even allows you to dump the stored backups to DVD or another portable harddisk for offsite keeping.
99.999% uptime is only 30 SECONDS per YEAR uptime
Hmm, that's serious energy saving for ya...
There really aren't that many filesystems around that meet your criteria. The only one I'm aware of acutally is Ext3 and IIRC that only supports offline shrinking. Other alternatives would be VxFS, Ext4 and maybe BTRFS, but I'm not too sure about their kernel integration.
I really have no idea how the parent got modded (Score:4, Funny), it should rather be (Score:5, Insightful)!
I couldn't agree more with the point he's making. Most of the CIOs I know would rather go blind-foldedly with a Microsoft solution than making an informed choice about which system would suit them best.
Why do people continue to insist that PC gaming, which is only done by a small percentage of computer users, is so important to Linux. It would be a simple matter to capture 90% of the PC market without ever having a single 3d driver, let alone anything more than the casual games Linux already has.
That's absolutely right. I used to play games on PC for a long time, but somewhere down the road I got tired of destabilizing an otherwise solid OS installation with tons of games and their dependencies, in addition to always having to keeping up with the latest hardware to get acceptable frame rates. This was the point where I switched all of my gaming to consoles (PS 1-3, Wii), which so far saved me a lot of money, time and hassle, not to mention the overall better game experience thanks to playing on a HDready TV set.
Back to the point, I think gaming on Linux is the least of all things to worry about. If Linux can become the default choice for standard office work as well as on mobile devices, hardware vendors and game programmers alike will become much more inclined to develop for Linux.
Well, I don't know. Although I'm aware that there are more modern tools like aptitude, synaptic et al, I still use dselect on Debian and Ubuntu systems today.
Agreed, it doesn't win any design prizes, but it certainly works really well and predictably, which is what I'm looking for when working on systems a few hundred kilmeters away.