kennywest

Some time ago I described my adventures in installing Debian (Lenny at that time) on an old Qube 2. It was cool to install it, but I didn't find a proper use for it. So it has been gathering dust for a while, until I decided to use it as a backup server for my desktop and wyse . So, this weekend I decided to fire up my favorite mondo script and create a backup for the wyse (before dist-upgrading it to squeeze). Unfortunately this didn't work very well. The moment the network card in the Qube gets some load it starts to hang. After some time in the backup process, I couldn't ping the Qube any more. The serial console didn't respond either, so I think it died. Putting a newer network card in the box's free PCI slot did not solve my issues either. It seems that Debian (or maybe even Linux) is just not stable enough to cope with a lot of network traffic / load. So in short, Debian failed miserably turning the Qube in a decent (albeit slow) NAS. After googling for a...

I've been using Ubuntu for quite some time now. Ever since the issues I've encountered while upgrading from Hoary, to Breezy, to Dapper, I decided to stick with LTS (or Long Term Support) releases. I don't care about using bleeding edge technology, I just want a PC that works. Being a first hour kubuntu with KDE4 user, I was a little bit displeased with the latest LTS release, so the past years I've been looking at different other distributions to see which one supports KDE best. Distributions with rolling releases earned extra points :) In 1998 SuSE 6.0 was released and I remember buying a big box containing 6 CDs in a local bookstore. I liked SuSE a lot. It was easy to install and maintain. The only downside was the RPM dependency hell you can end up with once you tried to install packages that were not available on the CDs. YAST already existed back then and was already doing a great job configuring the system (ncurses based, of course). Since openSuSE is very KDE...

As already mentioned in earlier posts, I uses mondo to create system backups of all my systems. By system backups I mean; create a backup of the live system, without any personal data. In short, this is a backup of everything except home folders. The home folders are backed up using rsync and external disks, but this is another story. Restoring from a mondo backup is easy; simply burn the images, put it in a cd drive and nuke the system (yes, this is a restore option in mondo :) ). If you just want to restore some files from the backup, without overwriting the whole system, there's an easy way to do this. Suppose you created an ISO a while ago and these are stored on some disk. First, you will need to mount the ISO as a loopback device like so: mount -o loop MyIso.iso /mnt The ISO is now mounted in /mnt . Now locate the file you want to restore (I was going to restore smb.conf ): $ grep smb.conf /mnt/archives/filelist.* /mnt/archives/filelist.11:/var/lib/ucf/cache/:etc:samba:...

I encountered the error mentioned in the title of this post after upgrading my samba install on Debian Lenny using Enterprise Samba binaries. The latest version they distribute at the time of writing is 3.4.9. My samba install talks to an ldap backend and the above error was shown upon starting the new version. Seems they added (or changed the default) option for the ldap protocol in smb.conf . Adding: ldap ssl = off makes the error go away. Cool.

In an earlier post I was talking about how I've been using mondo as preferred backup solution for quite some time. However, I have never used it to restore stuff, since I've never broken any install before and hardware hasn't failed on me yet. Since I wanted to replace the smaller 10GB hard drive, I've installed in the Wyse, with a bigger 500GB one, this would be an ideal case to try and restore everything with mondo . So I created a backup of the 10GB drive with mondo to an NFS share on another PC (using the script posted earlier). Next, burned the resulting ISO to a CD and finally booted from the CD and interactively restored my data. mondo has 2 main restore modes; interactive and nuke. Since my new drive was bigger than the original drive, mondo suggested to drop to interactive mode, which allowed me to create a whole new partition scheme (which is nice). The only thing that failed was grub installing itself on the master boot record. I'm not sure why, maybe...

Ubuntu has been a fantastic operating system for my desktop and has been my preferred Desktop OS for more than 3 years now. The cool thing about Ubuntu is it's Debian based. So you install once and dist-upgrade to every new release without ever having to reinstall the whole thing. The downside is a dist-upgrade in Ubuntu sometimes fails leaving you with a very b0rken system. That's why I stick with LTS releases for now, because I have little spare time to reinstall my desktop every few months or so. Nevertheless there are brave people out there always keeping track of the latest, more or less stable, version and don't mind the dist-upgrade problems. Anyway if your install is broken after a dist-upgrade (or any upgrade) it's always nice to have a backup at hand. In search of the ideal, most flexible, backup tool out there I found mondo . So, people, stop asking for a backup tool for Linux on forums, this one will suite your needs. Unlike some other tools, mondo creates ...