Recently a friend of mine (Sarah) purchased a dedicated server at a hosting company and moved her data to it. Obviously she was in need of a backup solution. She chose Amanda 2.6.0 and to use S3 as her “tape” choice.
Seeing how well it worked for her I asked her to show me how it worked and now my server is also using Amanda to backup to S3. Recovery works with amrecover.
I have quite a bit of data to back up (4.5GB in /home, for example) and with a home DSL connection it takes a long time. However with a bigger pipe using S3 and Amanda would be extremely viable.
I’m very happy with the solution and will likely use it across all of my servers from now on.
For my laptop I’m still using JungleDisk, which seems to work fine. 2.0 is a very good improvement.
Just a quick note. There’s a new Reve gem out as of June 7th. This one’s release notes are:
- Typo fix in Reve::Classes::MapKill - shipJills -> shipKills
- Resolve trac ticket 3 (lowercase field names in postfields method)
- Update documentation to make ‘charid’ more consistantly ‘characterid’
- Resolve trac ticket 2 (Reve does not use @charid, but takes it as an argument in initialize)
- Be strict about currentTime’s casing.
The code changes can be seen At the Reve Trac.
Yesterday we launched Mini Match, an application me and my colleagues from work wrote for Cartoon Network.
Late last year we opened a beta that was, unfortunately, short lived. Friday (May 30, 2008) we opened the system up on a much improved codebase for a few hours and had all systems “green”. Based on the positive success from Friday we opened it up yesterday.
It opened slowly at first with just a small advertisement on the Cartoon Network Games’ Page, and then a larger one on the same page and then we made the Cartoon Network home page with a small advertisement again. Today, I reckon, a larger advertisement will be put on the front page and we’ll really start to see traffic!
Some details on the application:
- Flash/Flex/AS/Whatever front-end GUI (really, it’s one of them)
- Java-based persistance server
- Rails-based funnel into the database with a bit of logic.
The Rails part is RESTful (for the most part) and is the “glue” of the application, to quote someone from IRC.
Today should be a fun day!
This coming Monday I’m flying off to Atlanta, Georgia for the week. Not keen on going as Atlanta is like descending into the armpit of summer. I’m hoping that the weather co-operates and I don’t melt. 
I’m flying down there for work, we’re beta launching a product for a customer (that’s based in Atlanta - go figure) and they (the customer) have requested a contingent of us from work be on site for the release. So it’s me and two others from the UK.
We’re down on Monday then flying back home on Friday evening - I’m hoping to be in bed by midnight (landing 22:05 - 30 minute taxi home, getting bags and immigration and such). A SysAdmin that works for our customer suggested Zuma sushi bar to me for sushi. I like sushi a lot and hope to stop in for some glorious sushi.
Last month I made a post about using rrdtool and ruby to graph hard disk temperatures. I recently had some hardware trouble and something with permissions went crazy. Today I took the time to look into the problem and fix it.
The /dev/hd[egik] device nodes were owned by root:disk and 660. However, the hddtemp binary was trying to do some restricted ioctl operations. Even though the binary was setuid and my non-root user was in the disk group I couldn’t access the disk to get the temperatures.
I found out that there is a hddtemp daemon which can query the disks for my unpriveleged user.
The daemon listens on a TCP port and provides output like this:
|/dev/hde|ST3160811AS|39|C||/dev/hdg|ST3160811AS|40|C||/dev/hdi|ST3160811AS|38|C||/dev/hdk|ST3160815AS|39|C|
Should be easy to modify my disk_temperature.rb to connect to that port and parse the data.
Now my temperature graphs will have new data (as soon as the change is made).
I received an email to my work account today that started with “Dear Sirs…”. The email was sent, presumably, to a large number of customers at once about a networking issue by a UK hosting company.
I am female and at the time the salutation bugged me. In normal society one doesn’t generally greet a member of one gender with the salutations of the other. When I received the email my brain put together discussions from LinuxChix mail lists and other recent discussions on women in IT.
I took offence at the salutation “Sirs” because it implies that there are no women working in IT which is clearly not the case.
Anyways, I sent an email in reply to the email (which went to a support@ email) saying that I didn’t appreciate being addressed as a “Sir”. Less than 25 minutes later I received an email from the managing director of saying he wrote the message and thought the salutation “Sirs” was …was an acceptable greeting if the gender of the other party is unknown. I’m not sure I agree but I appreciated the feedback anyways and replied to him thanking him for taking the time to reply. Hopefully he will do as his email says and take my feedback on board and change the way his company addresses emails to women.
My good deed for the day is done.
Since I got to North America I have wanted to put my system under better monitoring. It’s got four active hard disks (and a fifth powered, not active) hard disk in an IcyDock MB-455SPF 5-Bay Internal SATA Drive Enclosure (Manufacturer site, icydock.com, seems offline so link to where I bought it!) with the four active disks plugged into a HighPoint RocketRaid 1640 SATA controller.
I can easily use S.M.A.R.T. to monitor the temperature and the hddtemp Linux utility to get the temperatures of the disks.
It’s easy to use a crontask to poll the disks and to stuff the temperatures into an rrdtool database. I drew much inspiration from Martin Pot’s Perl script to do the same thing but implemented my own in a Ruby Rake task using the woefully undocumented RubyRRDtool gem and a custom hddtemp wrapper class to get the temperatures.
The similarities between my Rake task and Martin’s RRDtool-fu is obvious, however I wanted an hour graph too and so I added it in on line 17.
My next task is to combine the temperatures (lines) of all four disks into a single graph to get a feel for the overall temperature of the disks on one image.
The graphs can be seen at my personal website.
I’ve been back in North America for about a week and a half so far. Spent a week with my parents and am visiting a friend for a while.
I’m settling into life on this side of the pond again and it’s nice to be round people who sound like me (makes it easier for speechreading). I haven’t been working on Reve or my other Rails project (evedb) for a while. Been working on a smaller private app here and there when not doing my real work.
This is just a quick post to say that my life has become quite hectic as my spouse recently died. I’m also planning to move back to North America…
I haven’t had much time to wrap my head around my newest Reve ticket/bug report. Once things settle down again I’ll be able to get back into posting and making Reve better.
Another Reve release, 86. This time I’m fixing a bug with the strict XML parsing not picking up cachedUntil. Tests and test XML have been fixed. Check trac for specific changes.
