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Mon, 31 Mar 2008

The value of backups, part 2

Whenever someone grumbles online that they've lost some data, I always smugly suggest that they restore from their backups. After all, all of my stuff is backed up. I even test my backups because I also smugly tell people that "if you've not tested them you don't have backups, you have hopes".

Well, I just found out the hard way that I'd forgotten to add one of my remote shell accounts to my daily backups. Oops. You may now all point and laugh.

Posted at 01:20 by David Cantrell
keywords: geeky | rsnapshot
Permalink | 1 Comment
Wed, 19 Sep 2007

Talk Like A Pirate Day

In honour of Talk Like A Pirate Day, which has previously inspired me to write great software, I just released (well, committed to CVS anyway) arrsnapshot.

Posted at 17:22 by David Cantrell
keywords: geeky | rsnapshot | silly
Permalink | 0 Comments
Thu, 7 Jun 2007

Book review: Backup and Recovery

Author: Curtis Preston

ISBN: 0-596-10246-1

Publisher: O'Reilly

I contributed part of a chapter to this book, and so I got a free copy. I was expecting to take it home, put it on the shelf, and never use it. Today, less than 48 hours after getting the book in the post, I had to use it. The thoughtful comments and excellent description of how dump / restore work prevented me from looking like a complete tit on a public mailing list. I therefore recommend this book.

More seriously, it does look jolly good, covering just about all the backupish stuff that I've heard of and lots that I haven't. But more importantly, it devotes lots of space to restoring your backups - complete with step-by-step instructions for "bare metal" recovery - and talks about things to do when your backups are broken.

And it covers things that lots of admins don't like to think about, like Exchange and MySQL (and other databases; judging from a quick skim of the Oracle section I expect the coverage to be good).

Buy a copy of this book for your friendly local sysadmin. He will love you for ever.

Posted at 20:12 by David Cantrell
keywords: books | geeky | rsnapshot
Permalink | 0 Comments
Tue, 20 Feb 2007

The value of backups

Yesterday, my file server crashed badly. I hit the per-user process limit, so couldn't log in remotely, couldn't log in on the console - and so couldn't do a graceful shutdown. So I cycled the power. When it came back up, one of the filesystems was a bit buggered, as expected. But it was a bit more buggered than I first thought and couldn't be recovered. So I mkfsed it, adding journalling while I was at it, and it is now restoring from the last backup.

Rsnapshot FTW!

Posted at 20:12 by David Cantrell
keywords: geeky | rsnapshot | unix
Permalink | 0 Comments
Sat, 2 Sep 2006

YAPC::Europe 2006 report: day 3

There were quite a few interesting talks in the morning, especially Ivor's one on packaging perl applications. Oh, and mine about rsnapshot, of course, in which people laughed at the right places and I judged the length of it just right, finishing with a couple of minutes left for questions.

At the traditional end-of-YAPC auction, I avoided spending my usual stupid amounts of money on stupid things, which was nice. Obviously the hundred quid I put in to buying the hair style of next year's organisers wasn't stupid. Oh no. Definitely not.

An orange mohican will suit Domm beautifully.

Posted at 13:43 by David Cantrell
keywords: geeky | perl | rsnapshot | silly | yapc
Permalink | 1 Comment

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