Lunatic Platitudes

So I am a geek, right? I have my home network set up with SmokePing, which is a great tool for measuring and graphing latency. In addition to being a great tool to graph latency over time, it’s a great tool for figuring out when weird stuff happens. Because now, my network is sort of a well monitored organism within the house. When it is affected, one of my monitors will most likely reflect that.

The other morning when I went into my closet as I am oft’ to do, I was a bit surprised to find everything of mine in the middle of the floor. This is my de’marc room, BTW. I have a wire shelf above the door along the left wall which houses my primary DNS server, one of my wireless gateways and several boxes of stuff I don’t touch a whole lot. Phone and wired network terminations are done in here on the left hand wall near the door as well. There was another wire shelf along the back wall of the closet as well. Both shelves had decided to give up the ghost. I swear I will never buy another shelf like these. 9.5 years and they fall out of the wall.

What was odd about this was that I had no idea it had happened. It made me turn the clock back in my head and relive the previous evening. Was the closet a shamble when I went to bed? Maybe it had fallen during the day and I just was at work when it did or something. No. I put away a few shirts the evening before. It happened during the night. Ellyn can’t sleep through anything like that.

Ellyn!!! (what?!) Did you notice the closet was a complete shambled mess?! (… uh …?) Come Here and Look at This!! (… the sound of steps coming down the hall …) *shock* *amazement* *horror*

Neither of us woke up to the sound of multiple computers and other junk falling from the top of the closet, into the floor. As it turns out, Amrin did wake up and ask Ellyn about it. She didn’t hear anything so she told him to go back to sleep. We probably need more curious dogs. They were asleep through he whole thing too, I guess.

So why this post about this experience? Smokeping is cool.

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There were a lot more pictures taken in Savannah. It’s just taken me a little while to get them all resized and uploaded. My gallery for some reason was giving me trouble, so I took the easy way out… Still, I hope you enjoy these. The picture above is one Amrin took. If there is anything I have learned having a child it is to hand them the camera. Amrin has always made remembering trips more interesting. If you see a picture of nothing but a leaf, or the sky or a beautiful flower, it is probably the work of a child who took the time to notice what we didn’t think was so important at the time. It is ironic how they are revered treasures now.

Amrin also made a couple of videos which I have published on Google Video. It seems like they just turn out crappy when I do this, but here’s a link to one of them: . The original files are in the 100-200MB range, so I guess we have to put up with some quality degradation to get them out there. Just make the window smaller I guess.

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One day I walk in to the bathroom at work to see this contraption next to the sink.

This device has a 0.3mm x 9″ slot through which it pushes unheated air. The website claims the air is moving at 400mph, which I assume is prior to hitting the 0.3mm slot, but who knows. Essentially it creats a “blade” of air that wipes your hands dry in some stupidly fast amount of time.

It does get your hands dry after you pass them through a couple of times, but it’s a little weird. I’d rather use paper towels so I don’t have to grab that nasty door handle on the way out of the room. Not everyone stops at the sink on the way out… Also, the space to put your hands is great for someone with small hands but is less good for someone with hands intended to knock yo punk ass out.

Anyway, this isn’t a review, I just think it’s funny. One day I’ll take a picture of the toilet handle that says to push it UP for #1 and DOWN for #2…

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Ellyn was tired and left work early Friday. It gave me a wild idea to go to Savannah. If there were a bull, I was in the mood to grab it by the horns. So here we go. The picture above is of us goofing off at this little seafood restaurant. Ellyn wanted to eat someplace with a dock and a view of the ocean. This place had a dock and we were close to the ocean. Close enough, right? Click the image above to view the gallery.

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Flyback

I started using computers after the days of the punch cards. The horror stories I have heard about those days make me glad. It may be that I came into the world of computers after what some would consider the dark ages, but I’ve also witnessed a fair amount of improvement myself. My first computer stored media on audio cassette tapes. I spent many hours filling tape with the sounds that would be interpreted into code and spent at least half of those hours listening and hoping the process would complete successfully. Now, machines have relatively reliable spinning media hard disks that house data the likes of which I never imagined in those 8 bit days.

In all that time the thing I have been most guilty of is not performing regular backups of my data. It’s too much hassle, checking the status of things and testing restorations, etc. Also I am notorious for completely reinstalling my systems, testing out the latest releases of openSuSE, Fedora or Ubuntu. The overhead of doing backups has always been a deterrent for me and so I rarely even follow what others are doing to answer the problem of desktop backups.

Today I started to get curious. See, it’s really Ubuntu’s fault. 8.04 Hardy Heron is looking mighty good. I had been playing with some operating system or other on my laptop, and when things ran afoul, I decided to install Hardy Heron. It’s still in beta for another week or so, so getting everything up to date and all my necessary add-on packages took quite a while. While I was running through everything, I thought it would be neat if someone would make Time Machine for Linux like in Apple. I did a search and did a lot of catching up on the backup scene.

You will notice the Google code logo on the top of this post. What I found is a piece of software called “Flyback”. This appears to be a relatively simple software interface which uses tools that have been around forever, specifically and most importantly, rsync. I decided to switch my brain off and see if the thing works or not. Put simply, it does. I set up a NFS share on a Linux server after installing Flyback. I added the NFS mount to my fstab and mounted the share. After telling Flyback where to store backups, and then telling it to ignore the backup folder itself, I ran a backup. The first run produced a 3.1 Gigabyte directory structure. I did some other playing around, downloading and installing, reading web pages, doing basic poking around. I ran another backup after all of that and guess what? It produced a 74M incremental backup.

I did some testing with restoring a couple of files as well, which seems to be one of the coolest parts. The interface is totally and completely point and click. I couldn’t be happier. I realize now that a lot of people have been using rsync to perform backups. I also know there are other tools that purport to be just as good as Flyback, which is fine. The thing I like is how flyback organizes backups sort of the same way as Time Machine does it. I can choose to view what is on my machine as of right now, or flip back one backup cycle and see it the way it was then, or go back another backup cycle and see it that way. It’s everything but the pretty 3D flying through space thing.

In short, I feel confident I have found a new backup home. It’s one I think I can keep running with my limited time schedule. It’s also one I think won’t eat up my server space out of turn and will allow me to get at my data with or without the machine the data started on. Since it’s just an rsync copy, I can do with it whatever I want to. I don’t have to have the backup software in order to access or restore from my copies. The only thing I did that didn’t seem to be handled in the packaging was, I hand created the panel launcher for Flyback using “gksu” so it runs as root instead of me. I do that not because I don’t care about possible security side effects, but because I want to be able to backup and restore more than just my home directory.

Give Flyback a quick try. I believe it is a worthwhile solution to every day end user backup needs.

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My MythTV box decided to make it’s display too dark for me to see anything tonight.  I discovered pretty quickly the problem was gamma, contrast and brightness setting that somehow magically changed.  `ssh -X mythbox` and `nvidia-settings -c :0.0` allowed me to go in and set these settings remotely.  Obviously this only works with NVidia hardware.

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