The system works well, and for small businesses can easily store 1.5TB of data on a single 250MB [sic] HDD (make sure to mirror).
Indeed, BackupPC does some clever tricks when storing (partially) identical files, which they call "pooling". So it's not actually compression (it does that in addition to the pooling, too), but rather the non-storage of redundant information that saves lots of space in the backups.
The problem with offline folders is that they only work well for one user on that laptop, especially if it's the home share that's being offlined here.
But let's get back on topic. If it's not a really a chronological backup that's needed, then maybe https://www.foldershare.com/ could be a possible solution to the problem.
It synchronizes user-specifyable folders amongst multiple machines in a real-time fashion, so this might work well if those roadwarriors also have a desktop in the office they could synchronize to. Foldershare is also free as in beer.
Another solution could be http://www.logmein.com/ which is not free, but has many useful modules, backup being one of them. They also offer really good remote access solutions, which might be a selling point for some of the IT managers.
Heck, in the 90's even half the portable stereos, and every self-respecting cassette deck, had room for _two_ cassettes at the same time and a button to copy from one to the other.
Indeed, and they even had a feature called "high-speed dubbing", which allowed for copies to be made twice as fast.
In case you haven't noticed, rebooting has to happen fairly often for updates with most linux distributions recently. Probably about once every three times I get updates for Ubuntu or Fedora, I have to do a reboot.
In that case you must be updating some unstable kernel all the time, since that's the only practical reason for doing a reboot, even on Ubuntu or Fedora.
Technology moves ahead. Stay with your system, or upgrade. But no one will stop progress because you complain.
You can progress all you want, but I'm quite confident that there's still a lot of demand for new PATA devices, albeit for upgrading existing systems.
At home, I really don't envision replacing half a dozen computers perfectly capable of working a few more years, just because I can't get a replacement PATA harddisk to fix them, should the need arise. This is not progress, it's polluting the environment and wasting my money.
I'm just blown away that nearly every modern motherboard still has IDE, parallel, serial, and PS/2 ports. Hard to find ones that don't. I don't want the interrupts wasted! I don't want the board real estate wasted!
Then by all means, go ahead and disable all the interfaces you don't need/want in the BIOS. This will free up your precious IRQs (what for?) and allows the rest of the world to connect their trusty equipment to the legacy interfaces.
Remind me I should never hire you. Many enterprise level arrays require (for firmware reasons and testing validation) that the drives be identical. If all drives of a certain lot died on a specific day, I think people would notice. The purpose of RAID is to be able to survive a drive failure.
If you'd read TFA, you might have noticed that we're not in a enterprise level setting here.
On the contrary, the suggested solution is advertised for home use. As such, entry-level disks are being used, not the expensive enterprise level SCSI stuff you're probably used to, dear AC.
Aforementioned entry-level disks certainly do have the property of failing frequently, and according to Murphy they do so in the worst possible moment you can imagine, a RAID rebuild.
Is it not the case that you need to get identical sector sizes, too?
Not really, the physical sector size only matters when doing a hardware RAID, but even then, most modern controllers cope quite well with different disk.
Some people claim that identical sector sizes help performance somewhat, but so far, I haven't been able to reproduce any evidence for this.
Just make sure you don't follow TFA's recommendation regarding the choice of identical drives for the RAID array, which would make the whole point of redundancy moot.
Identical drives are just that, identical. This means that they also are very likely to fail at the same time or may not survive a RAID reconstruction process to rebuild the other failed drive.
My advice would be to make them identical only in size and maybe the interface, but for the love of God, do pick different manufacturers and production months for the drives.
I've seen half a dozen buy into Exchange as their primary mail server, then have to buy front-end Sendmail based servers to handle all their incoming email from outside their company because Exchange just couldn't deal with it.
I remember a company that had it's Exchange Server directly hooked up to the Internet on port 25, without any live antivirus software running! Months of arguing, pleading and even begging to either at least put some security softare on it or shield the thing using some Sendmail satellites doing the scanning were not enough to make management understand that there was a serious and realistic risk of our whole network going down in case of an infection.
Suddenly, it became all so much easier and management understood... I love you...
perhaps we should be talking to the advertisers -- would they be interested to hear Dell is charging them to be installed on PCs Dell knows will never be booted into windows? If the advertisers decide they don't want to pay for placement on those units, perhaps that would be the impetus for Dell to offer a 'no-OS' PC.
No, wrong. If the advertisers were to ask Dell to do accounting on which units received their bundle and which did not, then Dell would certainly collapse under the pressure and go back to selling only boxes with Windows preinstalled on them.
Why? Because they have the majority of the market behind them, along with Microsoft and the advertisers. -> Profit!
What really needs to happen is that people start telling those sales reps what they think about having to buy software they know they'll never use along with a preinstalled PC.
"And hey, I rather like this screenshot. It makes me look like Hitler and shit. Cool beans-- it was exactly the statement I was trying to make."
I'm still sitting here with my jaw hanging down after having read this! I think not only should he be sent to a basic lesson of copyright law, but also to a history lesson focussing on WW2!
I got my original TI-92 back in 1996, while studying mechanical engineering, which also involved lots of advanced maths. Since I knew that I was going to enter lots of formulas, I went with it instead of the the TI-89 (which is the exact same thing in a differnt housing), because it had a proper alphanumeric keyboard which made things easier.
What can I say, it was a life saver. It's calculating engine is based on Derive, one of the better known DOS maths programs back in the day.
Have you ever seen complex functions in "pretty print" on a TI-92? It doesn't come much clearer or more concise than that.
I even did the upgrade to the TI-92+, which basically only meant to replace some module in the back with something new. There's a big community which supplies all sorts of add-on programs and even a replacement operating system! Sure, it won't give you access to the Internet, but that's not what it was meant for.
The TI-92 has lasted me over 10 years now without any problems and it's still more than enough for what I need to do, so I think overall, it was a very good investment that paid off.
The problem with those Via Epia systems is their really abysmal performance. I run a couple of PD6000E systems in a closet as well and I can tell you, the heat dissipation is becoming a problem.
In addition, managing numerous small devices increasingly turned into a chore, which is why I'm in the process of moving it all to VMware Server. One big dual core server running all those small services with enough performance.
Gentoo is however quite a bit more difficult to install on it's own right, I would suggest starting off using one of the derivative distributions, such as Vida Linux or Sabayon. I myself prefer Sabayon out of the two, once the ridiculous amounts of orange and red are taken out of the theme. Much like Ubuntu in it's default install, Sabayon is almost painful to look at if you don't absolutely love orange and red. Well that's not the end of it. I gave Sabayon Linux a shot and was pleasantly surprised. The installation process along with the hardware detection was the best I've seen in a long time, everything worked, including 3D acceleration, Xgl, Compiz, etc.
Problems came up once I tried to make the damn thing update using emerge --sync && layman -S && emerge -uD world. There was lots of breakage, because Sabayon is partly based on their own special versions of some libraries, but otherwise depends on the portage tree of Gentoo.
In any case, I thought this was a good time to try out their "Get Live Help" button on the desktop (which I find to be a very cool idea!). I was taken to an IRC channel, seeking help there. In a nutshell, I was told that Sabayon could not be updated other than installing the next release. After I wiped my hosed installation, I was surprised to be told by a senior dev that Sabayon can actually be updated, but it would take careful considerations, mostly "masking" some unstable packages.
Sabayon could be a terrific beginner's distro thanks to their really awesome installation routine. They are held back, however, by deficiencies in day-to-day use. This, so I was promised on IRC, will change with their next release, 3.25 if I recall correctly.
And yeah, the emphasis on yellow-orange-red in their themes only serves to enfuriate when things don't go as planned.
I just finished one based on Ubuntu Edgy. It's more hardware and configuration specific, though -- it installs MythTV 0.20 as a combined system, the pcHDTV-5500 drivers, the nvidia driver, and LIRC. It also pre-configures MythTV with the pcHDTV-5500 card. Where can I download it?
This may have been fine in the good old days of "install and forget". But these days with the need to be CONSTANTLY up on security patches, it's become quite a nightmare to maintain a linux box for any length of time without having to do a complete reinstall because of unresolvable incompatibility problems between the Kernel, libs and software. Doing it by hand is a major recipe for disaster, but even keeping up with a distro's precompiled sets of upgrades is a crap shoot and has resulted in serveral system failures. I take it that you have never actually used Debian before. It is the only distribution I know that really can be installed once and be upgraded from then on, without any nightmares or unresolvable incompatibility problems whatsoever.
There are some significant differences between distributions:
* Fedora (based on RedHat) uses/etc/rc.d/init.d/rc to store start and stop scripts. Ubuntu (based on Debian) puts these scripts in/etc/init.d, and doesn't have the/etc/rc.d structure.
* Fedora has a program called service to start and stop services: eg. service mysqld start. Ubuntu users have to type/etc/init.d/mysqld start.
* Ubuntu has hidden the root user. You never log in as root. You never become root. root effectively does not exist. Everything is handled through sudo. Fedora, of course, has a root user.
* Runlevels are different. Fedora has runlevel 5 as the multi-user graphic runlevel. Ubuntu uses runlevel 2
* On Fedora, the default runlevel is set in/etc/inittab. Ubuntu doesn't even have an/etc/inittab. It uses a different process based on a/etc/events.d directory hierarchy. I have no idea where the default runlevel is set
* Package management is different as well. Fedora uses a program called yum to manage packages in rpm files. Ubuntu uses apt-get to manage packages in deb files. AFAIK, the packaging schemes are incompatible. (You can't apt-get an rpm package, and you can't yum a deb package.)... and I'm sure there are others. ... yet I fail to see how any of them would actually matter in terms of supporting a running MySQL installation. Whatever the init scripts being used, once the daemon is installed and running, it's all a matter of customizing the configuration.
My first thought was how strange this was considering how Shuttleworth is trying to move Ubuntu(Debian based) to the server( Ubuntu 6.06 LTS-long term support ) amongst the other Debian distro's out there. I wonder why the had originally included Debian for MySQL Enterprise Support in the first place since the business case is still growing. While I appreciate what Mr. Shuttleworth is doing with Ubuntu, I think those not using RedHat or SuSE will go with the traditional choice, Debian proper.
I'd be hard pressed to come up with more stable alternatives when choosing a distribution for a Linux server. In any case, I think not offering support for any Debian based distributions is a bad idea, mostly because there's so many of them. This really is lots of revenue they'll be missing out on.
I'm glad somebody finally mentioned Gizmoproject! It works really well (even on my Nokia770!) and allows for free calls to landlines if your contacts put them into their profiles.
Best of all, you can connect direcly to an Asterisk PBX using IAX with it, if you want to.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, BackupPC does some clever tricks when storing (partially) identical files, which they call "pooling". So it's not actually compression (it does that in addition to the pooling, too), but rather the non-storage of redundant information that saves lots of space in the backups.
The problem with offline folders is that they only work well for one user on that laptop, especially if it's the home share that's being offlined here.
But let's get back on topic. If it's not a really a chronological backup that's needed, then maybe https://www.foldershare.com/ could be a possible solution to the problem.
It synchronizes user-specifyable folders amongst multiple machines in a real-time fashion, so this might work well if those roadwarriors also have a desktop in the office they could synchronize to. Foldershare is also free as in beer.
Another solution could be http://www.logmein.com/ which is not free, but has many useful modules, backup being one of them. They also offer really good remote access solutions, which might be a selling point for some of the IT managers.
Indeed, and they even had a feature called "high-speed dubbing", which allowed for copies to be made twice as fast.
In that case you must be updating some unstable kernel all the time, since that's the only practical reason for doing a reboot, even on Ubuntu or Fedora.
I know some of my computers can't boot from controller cards, so they'll be dead in the water once PATA disks are no longer available.
You can progress all you want, but I'm quite confident that there's still a lot of demand for new PATA devices, albeit for upgrading existing systems.
At home, I really don't envision replacing half a dozen computers perfectly capable of working a few more years, just because I can't get a replacement PATA harddisk to fix them, should the need arise. This is not progress, it's polluting the environment and wasting my money.
Then by all means, go ahead and disable all the interfaces you don't need/want in the BIOS. This will free up your precious IRQs (what for?) and allows the rest of the world to connect their trusty equipment to the legacy interfaces.
If you'd read TFA, you might have noticed that we're not in a enterprise level setting here.
On the contrary, the suggested solution is advertised for home use. As such, entry-level disks are being used, not the expensive enterprise level SCSI stuff you're probably used to, dear AC.
Aforementioned entry-level disks certainly do have the property of failing frequently, and according to Murphy they do so in the worst possible moment you can imagine, a RAID rebuild.
Not really, the physical sector size only matters when doing a hardware RAID, but even then, most modern controllers cope quite well with different disk.
Some people claim that identical sector sizes help performance somewhat, but so far, I haven't been able to reproduce any evidence for this.
Just make sure you don't follow TFA's recommendation regarding the choice of identical drives for the RAID array, which would make the whole point of redundancy moot.
Identical drives are just that, identical. This means that they also are very likely to fail at the same time or may not survive a RAID reconstruction process to rebuild the other failed drive.
My advice would be to make them identical only in size and maybe the interface, but for the love of God, do pick different manufacturers and production months for the drives.
I remember a company that had it's Exchange Server directly hooked up to the Internet on port 25, without any live antivirus software running! Months of arguing, pleading and even begging to either at least put some security softare on it or shield the thing using some Sendmail satellites doing the scanning were not enough to make management understand that there was a serious and realistic risk of our whole network going down in case of an infection.
Suddenly, it became all so much easier and management understood... I love you...
No, wrong. If the advertisers were to ask Dell to do accounting on which units received their bundle and which did not, then Dell would certainly collapse under the pressure and go back to selling only boxes with Windows preinstalled on them.
Why? Because they have the majority of the market behind them, along with Microsoft and the advertisers. -> Profit!
What really needs to happen is that people start telling those sales reps what they think about having to buy software they know they'll never use along with a preinstalled PC.
Has anybody actually read what he says in his blog?
) screenshot of his:
Taken from http://www.michaelcrook.org/thedmcacase.html, where he's talking about this (http://www.michaelcrook.org/extrafiles/crook.jpg
"And hey, I rather like this screenshot. It makes me look like Hitler and shit. Cool beans-- it was exactly the statement I was trying to make."
I'm still sitting here with my jaw hanging down after having read this! I think not only should he be sent to a basic lesson of copyright law, but also to a history lesson focussing on WW2!
I got my original TI-92 back in 1996, while studying mechanical engineering, which also involved lots of advanced maths. Since I knew that I was going to enter lots of formulas, I went with it instead of the the TI-89 (which is the exact same thing in a differnt housing), because it had a proper alphanumeric keyboard which made things easier.
What can I say, it was a life saver. It's calculating engine is based on Derive, one of the better known DOS maths programs back in the day.
Have you ever seen complex functions in "pretty print" on a TI-92? It doesn't come much clearer or more concise than that.
I even did the upgrade to the TI-92+, which basically only meant to replace some module in the back with something new. There's a big community which supplies all sorts of add-on programs and even a replacement operating system! Sure, it won't give you access to the Internet, but that's not what it was meant for.
The TI-92 has lasted me over 10 years now without any problems and it's still more than enough for what I need to do, so I think overall, it was a very good investment that paid off.
The problem with those Via Epia systems is their really abysmal performance. I run a couple of PD6000E systems in a closet as well and I can tell you, the heat dissipation is becoming a problem.
In addition, managing numerous small devices increasingly turned into a chore, which is why I'm in the process of moving it all to VMware Server. One big dual core server running all those small services with enough performance.
Problems came up once I tried to make the damn thing update using emerge --sync && layman -S && emerge -uD world. There was lots of breakage, because Sabayon is partly based on their own special versions of some libraries, but otherwise depends on the portage tree of Gentoo.
In any case, I thought this was a good time to try out their "Get Live Help" button on the desktop (which I find to be a very cool idea!). I was taken to an IRC channel, seeking help there. In a nutshell, I was told that Sabayon could not be updated other than installing the next release. After I wiped my hosed installation, I was surprised to be told by a senior dev that Sabayon can actually be updated, but it would take careful considerations, mostly "masking" some unstable packages.
Sabayon could be a terrific beginner's distro thanks to their really awesome installation routine. They are held back, however, by deficiencies in day-to-day use. This, so I was promised on IRC, will change with their next release, 3.25 if I recall correctly.
And yeah, the emphasis on yellow-orange-red in their themes only serves to enfuriate when things don't go as planned.
Well I hope their website is going to be released soon as well. All I get from your URL http://www.pclinuxos.com/ is a redirect to http://rubens.hmdnsgroup.com/suspended.page/ where it says that the page is not available.
* Fedora (based on RedHat) uses
* Fedora has a program called service to start and stop services: eg. service mysqld start. Ubuntu users have to type
* Ubuntu has hidden the root user. You never log in as root. You never become root. root effectively does not exist. Everything is handled through sudo. Fedora, of course, has a root user.
* Runlevels are different. Fedora has runlevel 5 as the multi-user graphic runlevel. Ubuntu uses runlevel 2
* On Fedora, the default runlevel is set in
* Package management is different as well. Fedora uses a program called yum to manage packages in rpm files. Ubuntu uses apt-get to manage packages in deb files. AFAIK, the packaging schemes are incompatible. (You can't apt-get an rpm package, and you can't yum a deb package.)
I'd be hard pressed to come up with more stable alternatives when choosing a distribution for a Linux server. In any case, I think not offering support for any Debian based distributions is a bad idea, mostly because there's so many of them. This really is lots of revenue they'll be missing out on.
Wow, no wonder people consider it to be insecure...
I'm glad somebody finally mentioned Gizmoproject! It works really well (even on my Nokia770!) and allows for free calls to landlines if your contacts put them into their profiles.
Best of all, you can connect direcly to an Asterisk PBX using IAX with it, if you want to.
Not really. New german orthography makes less use of the ß (sharp-s as it's called natively).
Note that there are also national differences. The Swiss for example don't have the ß at all and use ss everywhere instead.
Wir heißen unsere neuen Insektenüberlordschaften willkommen!
:)
Gotta match the numerus on that adjective with the subject there... I like the sharp-s though.