It seems that things happen in clusters, sometimes it’s more of a chain reaction. My longtime working laptop lost the ability to backlight the display. Yes, the backlight is replacable with a couple hours tear down and rebuild. Of course, they’re fragile parts and although I’ve replaced them in the past. I’ve got to a point that I didn’t feel it was worth it. The laptop was a ~1Ghz single core PIII or PIV with 2GB of memory. It has had flakey wireless lately, sometimes the machine will wake up and the wireless isn’t working. It’s clone had died with a power switch issue that could have only been solved with a motherboard replacement. So, I switched to an older spare while I ordered a replacement from Dell.
Tag: backup
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Recovering a Split BiggieFile from a MondoRescue Backup
Once upon a time I wrote of manually extracting a file from a mondorescue backup. Sometimes it’s just easier to do that, than have mondorescue go through 30 some cds or dvds just to find one file. (Not to mention the fact that the iso’s aren’t burned to disc but are just stored on a usb HD.) So, I’ve just had the opportunity to try to restore one of the “biggiefiles”. Mondoarchive attempts to split huge files up into smaller slices for archiving. The size is something that I think is configurable, but I haven’t made any changes from the default.
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PHP Link Directory and Importing Links
I’ve fought this evening with Php Link Directory. I had a list of addresses I wanted to add in bulk and managed to string together the correct format of a csv file for import. It’s somewhat of a long story, it started with lynx dumping the source of a web page, sed trimming just the links, then just the link titles, etc. Finally a few scripts later I had a basic spreadsheet. Added NULL values in a few fields and tried the import. Everything looked good, so I thought I’d test adding a link through the user interface and see if everything was good.
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The Risk of Cloud Computing, Trust
There’s a lot of buzz these days about “cloud computing”. You may be asking yourself just what IS cloud computing? The concept is that you are not as reliant on your personal computer, but your applications and data are kept somewhere in the internet “cloud”. So for instance, I use google calendars and gmail for several things. All my calendar data is stored with Google. There are several backup services that work on the concept of online backups. This is a variation in a sense, for all of them you are relying on a server somewhere online to be where your applications or data are stored. Of course, I can hear it now, “I don’t know if I like that idea”. Yes, there are a lot of risks. Recently Charter Communications has been in the news for losing the contents of 14,000 email accounts. That should…
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Making sense of the different versions of Vista
Microsoft Vista is now out, the next version of Windows, successor to XP. While Windows XP will continue to receive updates into 2014 there are many that might be eager to upgrade and move to the latest greatest. (Note to those: Service Pack one may be en route THIS calendar year, so unless you like to bleed on the edge…. you MIGHT hold off until that’s out.) But those that do look at getting Vista are met with a dizzying array of choices.
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Live filesystem “capture” into a virtual disk image
ah… the joys of *nix utilities…. I’ve just successfully tested a “capture” of a live, running system into a virtual disk image. No, I don’t mean that I booted up with an imaging utility. I took a live, booted and logged in system and imaged the primary hard drive that it was living on, into a file on another machine. (Yeah, I know, there are probably a few people reading this and saying they’ve done that and most people that would need to do this already know how…. sorry I missed the memo.) Not too long ago, VMWare released a tool to do something like this (that tool is for windows…) This should work on any platform that supports dd and netcat (although I’m not sure if piping output from one program to another works with a dos command shell – maybe cygwin would be a good environment to accomplish this with.) Anyway… here are the details.
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Vmware launches beta of real to virtual converter
Vmware has launched a tool (windows only it seems) aimed to convert a REAL running system into a virtual machine. (For use with VMWare’s virtualization products. The converter also can convert images from competing virtual machine “platforms”(?) (Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly LiveState Recovery) and Norton Ghost9 (or higher) to VMware virtual machine disk format.)
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Chase throws data on 2.6 million customers in landfill
Chase Card services mistakenly threw out backup tapes that contained the card information of around 2.6 million customers (according to the article Circuit City card holders (former and current.)) 5 data tapes were mistakenly trashed in July. Fortunately, they think the tapes were destroyed at the landfill, and are 1)notifying the affect, 2)working with authorities. So, it may be that no data in this case was actually leaked… it does underscore one thing….
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The ways data is stolen..
Brian Krebs highlights a study on data theft/breaches. There are some interesting results (just 1/3 of data breaches were from criminal hacking, 29% from stolen laptops or storage media, 23% from improper disclosure of information (oops I published all our customers information on the website.) and 7% from inside sources – employees taking/selling data, just 2% from lost backup tapes (wouldn’t that fall under storage media?)
The leaders in data loss seem to be Colleges and Universities, followed by the Government and then businesses.
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WordPress 2.0.4 Update
It has been a few days now, but I noticed that WordPress 2.0.4 has now been released and is highly recommended due to the fixing of a few security issues. They also list a number of bugfixes as well. So, if you’re running a site based on wordpress it’s time to update. It’s really a fairly painless process. I do recall upgrading ONE site to 2.0.3 and it was quite painFUL…. things went quite wrong and I had to restore the database from a backup. BUT… I’ve now upgraded 5 or so installs to 2.0.4 without a hitch. (One was a 2.0.3 install and the others were (I believe) 2.0.2).