JAX Airport

On my way to Portland, OR for RailsConf08. I’m flying Delta so I’ll probably be wedged between two 300 pounders Atlantans. Please God buy 2 seats.

Anyway, the new Concourse A is open and looks great! Many more AC outlets, but not enough! The moving sidewalks are the widest I’ve ever seen, 5 feet maybe…? Lots of windows and nothing like the troll cave it use to be.

Looking forward to Portland and 2 weeks of vacation in Alaska, afterward!

rdiff-backup

rdiff-backup is a wonderful program. There I said it! I’m in love with a backup program. As chief cook and bottle washer I must backup our servers (off-site) and systems in the office and there is no better way that I’ve found than rdiff-backup,

First off there is no restore command or shall I say not a conventional one. Just use cp . rdiff-backup, RDB, creates a mirror of the machine you are backing up so just go to that directory and copy the files or drag and drop using a gui. The files in the mirror are from you last backup. Of course RDB stores incremental reverse diffs so if you need to see that file that’s gone missing it’s pretty easy to do that but you’ll need to use RDB’s command line interface.

Here’s my backup scheme…Most of our backups are done using a 3rd party user called backthatassup . ‘backthat…’ stores his (her?) RDB commands in a crontab that looks like this:

00 11 * * * sudo rdiff-backup -v6 --print-statistics  \
                 --exclude '/mnt/home/home/**/.Trash/'  \
                 --exclude '/mnt/home/home/**/.google/'  \
                 --exclude '/mnt/home/home/**/.cache/'  \
                 --exclude '**.log'  \
                  /mnt/home/home  \
                  /media/disk/backups/jokerman/home 

# cleanup backups each month to only hold 2 months worth of data

@monthly  sudo rdiff-backup -v6 --print-statistics \
                  --remove-older-than 2M \
                  --force \
                  /media/disk/backups/jokerman/home 

The first command runs daily at 11 am and backups up the directory:

/mnt/home/home

The backup is stored at:

/media/disk/backups/jokerman/home

The options:

• -v6 – verbosity level
• —print-statistics – gives a summary at the end of the backup.
• —exclude – the directories and files I don’t want to backup.

The second command runs monthly and removes all files older than 2 months old.

Restoring files that are older than the current mirror is pretty easy. You can specify that you want a file from a specific date or relative from now. To restore the file, file.to.recover from 10 days ago try:

rdiff-backup -r 10D /my/backup/location/file.to.recover \
                              /and/put/it/here/

RDB runs on most unix, mac os x and window’s platforms. I personally use it to backup all 3 of those platforms on to my ubuntu machine which has a couple of external harddrives for storage. When backing up machines on the internets all data is transferred using ssh. Read Secure. RDB uses the rsync library so only changed versions of files are sent. This is handy when backing-up large log files that may be gigabytes in length but only increase by tens of megabytes each day. Only the additions are sent NOT the whole file.

More examples.

rdiff-backup home

Gygax is dead

It was probably around 1979 when I played my first D&D game. Bob, my step-father, was the DM (dungeon master for the uninitiated). My friends would spend 5-6 hours each Saturday conjuring spells and hacking our way out of tight situations. Sometimes my mom would play and also some other adults. We were all equals around the dining room table with the plexiglass over the sewing cardboard cutting board as our graph paper. We would spent countless hours painting our little metal figures on non-playing days. I waxed back in forth between being a halfling thief or human ranger depending on the campaign. My friend Johnathon Espineli would draw great renderings of our characters and all of their weapons. Another friend Chris Gordon was always passing secret notes to the DM about some sinister subplot he was creating. Oh the intrigue and fun.

Gary Gygax had no idea the endless entertainment he created at my house. Although, I haven’t played in decades, Gary will be missed. So, thanks Gary for creating a great game that this nerd loved and shared with the ones he loved and loves. Thanks Bob for DMing all of those games, you’re the best. Chris, Jonathon, Danny, James, Mom, and Uncle Fred we have all shared time together which is the greatest gift any of us can give to one another.

MicroVolunteering

I’ve spoke to a few people about microvolunteering and it seems to stir interest. Microvolunteering is a similar idea to Velcro in so much that 1 little hook and eye won’t make much difference but many hooks and eyes can hold a lot of weight. So, what is it?

MicroVolunteering

Microvolunteering is the idea that volunteering small amounts of time by many people makes a difference. If you pickup trash at your favorite park or volunteer at the pet shelter for even 10 or 15 minutes this could make a huge impact on your community. Now everyone has 10, 15 or 30 minutes a day or week to give. My idea is to create a central website to coordinate such activities. Someone or organization could post a job that needs to be done and individuals could sign up to do it. Or, jobs could automatically be created by just logging what you did while you walked your dog around the block, like:

Picked up garbage around the bus stop at Riverside and Lomax St.

It’s basically a social networking site that is centralized around making your community a better place. Want to know more? Me too! I’m making this up as I go along.

I’m looking for a corporate sponsor to foot the bill for the website development and then they could brand it however they like. I would like to see a Ford or Apple or Google or some other multinational fund the crap out this so we could really make an impact in our communities on our time and in our own personal ways.

Ella says MicroVolunteer

Railsconf08

Yep, I’m going…. And so is Burt i.e. The Breaker