Category: Tech

At work last week we were looking at backups on a group of machines that had been installed by another company but which our team had recently taken over. I was interested in the backup system they had which involved doing a lvm snapshot of the boot partition and then rsyncing this to another machine is the group ( the rsync’s went around in a circle more or less).

This looked quite cute for quick machine recoveries ( we kickstart our servers but we are still at the stage of doing a fair bit of post install setup ) and we had a think about recovering machines by doing a simple kickstart, then netbooting the server, mounting the root partition under the netboot and rsyncing it back to the install. This seemed a promising idea which we thought would only take an hour or so per machine.

However over the weekend I had a bit of a think and it popped into my head that Mondorescue almost did this sort of thing out of the box already. So I’ve been playing around a it this week with it.

So what I have now ( testing using a scratch VM ) are a few commands that:

1. Backup the server to a NFS partition.
2. Make an differential backup since the previous backup

Which means I now have a directory on a NFS server with a couple of bootable ISOs sitting in it. One has the full backup of the machine ( it’s about a third of the size of the used space ) and the other has any changes made since the first was done. I do the differential since the full backup takes about 30 minutes of hard work for the server while the incremental only takes 3 minutes or so ( YMMV ). I’ll probably do full backups every week and differential backups nightly.

The fun bit is the recovery:

1. Remove console the server and boot it over the network
2. Use PXE to boot the full backup mondorescue image
3. Mondo boots and thee automatic restores the server to the state is was when the last backup was made (about 15 minutes) . I then have to hit enter a couple of times to reboot
4. Netboot the incremental mondo image.
5. Mondo now applies any changes between the last full and the last differential backup.
6. Reboot again to the hard drive
7. Finished, machine should be up and running.

A bit of testing shows this only takes about 20 minutes for my test VM ( 3 Gigabytes of default RHE 5 goodness ) and production servers shouldn’t be much slower ( more data but faster disks and CPUs ).

With a bit of luck I should have this ready to deploy in a few days ( although I’m a little short of NFS space to apply it to every machine ).

Overall a fun couple of days, depending on how it goes I might even do a lightning talk about it at the Sysadmin Miniconf next month although I’m not sure if it’s a little trivial since this is close to “out of the box” functionality for Mondorescue.

I’ve just moved this blog’s software from nanoblogger to wordpress.

Things appear to be mostly working but I’ve got a bit of tweaking to do, plugins to add, tags and categories to create etc. However old article links mostly work.

Also as covered in techcrunch bloglines appears to be having serious problems with at least 10% of feeds completely broken and other unreliable. So if you are using bloglines you probably want to seriously consider moving to google reader or some other alternative.

Recently [Jurgen Appelo](http://nooperation.typepad.com/about.html)
listed the [Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers](http://www.noop.nl/2008/09/top-100-blogs-for-development-managers-q3-2008.html) .

Now the list looks okay except for the first entry – [Joel on Software](http://www.joelonsoftware.com). Now I’ve been subscribing to
the site for a few years along with at least 100,000 other people (
about 10,000 times more than read this blog) but I really question it
being number one anymore.

Sure there are great articles and Joel is a smart guy who creates things
like [Stackoverflow.com](http://stackoverflow.com) but I doing really
think his blog deserves the Number 1 ranking anymore.

The main reason is that Joel doesn’t really write any articles. Looking
at his [archive page](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/Archive.html) we can
see the recent history:

Year	Number of articles

2000	42
2001	23
2002	14
2003	12
2004	9
2005	22
2006	20
2007	12
2008	4 so far

Yes, just 4 articles this year so far and the [last one](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html) was in May, over
6 months ago.

Now Joel is doing the odd smaller post, he podcasts and writes articles in Inc
but the point of reading the blog is the content there, not somewhere else.

So really, you can’t rate a blog that hasn’t had a real post for 6 months as being
the top blog in the world for software development managers. Even [Paul Graham](http://www.paulgraham.com/) posts more often.
END

On Saturday ( 11th July ) I went to [Barcamp Auckland 2](http://bca.geek.nz/)
over at Botany Downs. Like [last year](http://bca.ludwignz.com/) ( which I
seem not to have blogged about) it was a 1 day “web technology” orientated
unconference organised by [Ludwig Wendzich](http://ludwignz.com/) and a group of
helpers.

Once again the venue ( Botany Downs Secondary College ) was great although
this time around the weather was nasty so things were a bit cold. I also
had a headache and queasy stomach so most of the time I felt like [this](http://flickr.com/photos/talios/2663111543)
( although at one point I [felt like this](http://flickr.com/photos/zakhenry/2660119763) , I think the pills had just kicked in ). So
my concentration skills weren’t on their best.

So here is a list of stuff I went to, the programme doesn’t seem to be online
anywhere so things are a little spares wrt names, titles and the like. Most of
the talks were fairly informal with a lot of audience participation. I
have an idea for a website so I went along to a couple of the more commercial talks.

**Productivity**

A talk from [Ben Young](http://blog.bwagy.com/give-users-what-they-want/) followed by a bit of a round table about productivity. The usual
stuff like only checking your email now and then and otherwise trying to
avoid interruptions plus a few other ideas about.

Suggested Tools:
[GoTo Meeting](https://www.gotomeeting.com/) , [Kayako](http://www.kayako.com/) , [OTRS](http://otrs.org/)

**Advertising**

A great overview by Regan from [throng](http://www.throng.co.nz) ( NZ TV website) about their experiences
with advertising and making money from their site. He discussed the various
text ads, textlink ads, Video Ads ( recommended [Unruly Media](http://www.unrulymedia.com/) ) and affiliate programmes.

Good discussion from others in the room including one guy who is getting 20% clickthoughs on google ads(!). There
was also some discussion about getting New Zealand ads onto smaller sites. It sounds like some people
are talking about an ad network for independent publishers.

**Frontend Performance, Yslow etc**

I organised a little session ( with a 5 minute’s notice) about the [Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site](http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html)
stuff that has been big for the last year or so and experiences people had had. I can’t say it
was a very good session. I didn’t prepare or know the topic backwards so I was pretty disorganised. There was some round table discussion about people’s
expediences but I can’t say I was very happy with how it went.

**Windows, IE**

One of the guys from Microsoft talked about the problem of getting people off IE6
and up to the latest XP service packs. Some 25% of the population are still on IE6
( another 25% Firefox and around 50% IE7). The idea is to get these people
upgraded to secure systems and using standards compliant browsers.

There was also a bit of talk about IE8 and how a good percentage of of sites with “IE hacks”
didn’t render nicely anymore because IE8 was now more standards compliant.

**SEO**

Another session from [Ben Young](http://blog.bwagy.com/give-users-what-they-want/) with some general
advice of Search Engine optimisation. Lots of good general advice on setting goals, monitoring progress and different areas
plus some special sauce on building links in a non-spammy way.

**iphone seller**

A talk from a guy from [Mob](http://www.mob.co.nz) about how:

1. Fly to the US
2. Buy 15 iphones
3. Attending technical conference
4. Fly back to NZ
5. Unlock and sell iphones
6. Profit!
7. Goto 1

Turned into a real business.

**Careers**

A session of 20 people giving [Ludwig Wendzich](http://ludwignz.com/) ( 17 year old main organiser)
career advice. More interesting than it sounds.

**Other**

There was a bunch of other stuff:

* Ran into the usual suspects and couple of people from back at Telecom
* Saw [Rock Band](http://www.rockband.com/) game.
* Didn’t see the 5 minute coding competition due to crowd
* Lunch plus two breaks worth of food served
* Cute little online app to synchronise stuff, book rooms and see what was happening
* Around 40 people didn’t show up when others got turned away 🙁

**Other Write ups**

* [Official Bebrief](http://ludwignz.com/index.php/site/journal_entry/barcamp_auckland_2_debrief/) from Ludwig Wendzich
* [Simon Gianoutsos](http://gianouts.blogspot.com/2008/07/barcamp-auckland-2-synopsis.html)
* [Ben Young](http://blog.bwagy.com/give-users-what-they-want/)
* [Some guy without his name on his blog](http://www.devour.co.nz/2008/07/13/barcamp-auckland-2008/)

END