This is great advice! A laptop as a server is also great because it uses up very little power!!! Stick one or two 1TB external drives (now $89 each) on top of it, and use it as a NAS. (see http://rsnapshot.org/ for some ideas.)
My dilemma was this, I need some kind of NAS/filer that is backed up, but the backup method should be such that every time my "liberal-arts-major" wife deletes something, she does not have to bug me to get the data back. (I don't want to spend all my little free time grabbing tapes, and then hunting and untaring just the right files.)
In a perfect world, someone like NetApp would make a cheep (sub $300) consumer head-end that USB drives could be connected to. I pick Netapp specifically because of how much I love their snapshot utility. But alas, no love for us.
While I was hunting around for solutions, talking to all of my sysadmin friends, and getting all of their cool scripts to automate backups, I came across the utility called rsnapshot. http://www.rsnapshot.org/
Rsnapshot is the same thing as netapps snapshot; it allows you to make a mirror of your current drive, and backup every X amount of time. (read the website, they explain it much better.) Basically, all you do is setup a second drive, and have rsnapshot mirror the data to it automatically. You then mount the second drive read-only, and within it there are directorys that are 5 min, 30 min, 1 hour, 8 hour, 1 week, 1 day, 1 year, etc. copies of the primary drive. So now when the wife wants to get data that was lost, all she has to do is go into the other drive, go into the subdir when the data was backed up, and get the file. - Simple!
Total cost: Beater PC: free or $500 Extra IDE card: $20 Two "filer" disk drives: (how much do you want to spend?) 500GB for $200 each A unix distro: free rsnapshot: free nfs and samba: free
My question is if they NAT or do you get an IP? More specificly, do they allow non-established TCP ports to your home system, or do they lock everything down and call it "security"?
I use a service like http://www.everydns.net/ so that my home compter has a dns entry, and grandma can view pictures of the kids (the IP can change, and your url still works). To do this I need to make sure that they allow TCP ports 80, 443, etc. I had Verizon DSL for a short while until I realised that I was not able to send web traffic to my home system, so I went with cable internet.
I wonder if they block incomming (non-established) traffic. Anyone know?
Slashdot Mirror
This is great advice! A laptop as a server is also great because it uses up very little power!!! Stick one or two 1TB external drives (now $89 each) on top of it, and use it as a NAS. (see http://rsnapshot.org/ for some ideas.)
I spent many an hour back in the 80's beating up on lamers at Michigan and Stanford.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(computer_game)
http://www.lgm.com/bolo/intro/
Yea no kidding. No one understands what _Best_Effort_Protocol_ means. (sigh)
Here is the truth:
If you carved the words "ethernet" on a stick and then smeared shit over it, people would stand in line to buy it.
I was in a similar bind not too long ago.
My dilemma was this, I need some kind of NAS/filer that is backed up, but the backup method should be such that every time my "liberal-arts-major" wife deletes something, she does not have to bug me to get the data back. (I don't want to spend all my little free time grabbing tapes, and then hunting and untaring just the right files.)
In a perfect world, someone like NetApp would make a cheep (sub $300) consumer head-end that USB drives could be connected to. I pick Netapp specifically because of how much I love their snapshot utility. But alas, no love for us.
While I was hunting around for solutions, talking to all of my sysadmin friends, and getting all of their cool scripts to automate backups, I came across the utility called rsnapshot. http://www.rsnapshot.org/
Rsnapshot is the same thing as netapps snapshot; it allows you to make a mirror of your current drive, and backup every X amount of time. (read the website, they explain it much better.) Basically, all you do is setup a second drive, and have rsnapshot mirror the data to it automatically. You then mount the second drive read-only, and within it there are directorys that are 5 min, 30 min, 1 hour, 8 hour, 1 week, 1 day, 1 year, etc. copies of the primary drive. So now when the wife wants to get data that was lost, all she has to do is go into the other drive, go into the subdir when the data was backed up, and get the file. - Simple!
Total cost:
Beater PC: free or $500
Extra IDE card: $20
Two "filer" disk drives: (how much do you want to spend?) 500GB for $200 each
A unix distro: free
rsnapshot: free
nfs and samba: free
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_O'Reilly
http://www.oreilly.com/
My question is if they NAT or do you get an IP?
More specificly, do they allow non-established TCP ports to your home system, or do they lock everything down and call it "security"?
I use a service like http://www.everydns.net/ so that my home compter has a dns entry, and grandma can view pictures of the kids (the IP can change, and your url still works). To do this I need to make sure that they allow TCP ports 80, 443, etc. I had Verizon DSL for a short while until I realised that I was not able to send web traffic to my home system, so I went with cable internet.
I wonder if they block incomming (non-established) traffic. Anyone know?
thanks!
Why sell a Dell without an OS? Why not pre install Linux? Then it would not be OS-less!
.
Or is Linux not an OS?
-chuckbag
Hell yea! Or frat used to sign out the labs for "training" and run bolo tournaments!! (remember Bolo???)
Then Doom came out, and that's when the headaches started.....