I’ll pass on the fish tonight, thanks
No TNUA for me tonight, damn it. I spent all day (riding in at sunrise, riding home after sunset) wrestling with a tape backup unit and I’m just to whipped, mentally. Physically, I’m still sore from this weekend—going six weeks between long rides isn’t the best plan—but I could probably make it tonight if I wanted to take tomorrow as a rest day.
The forecast is for May in January, so staying off the bike isn’t going to happen. The best bet then, is to blow off TNUA tonight and make up the miles Wednesday and Thursday with nice daytime rides.
rant
That tape job is just nuts. I threw up my hands mid-morning today and called in the vendor. The vendor and I put another four hours into it this afternoon and by the time we left, we’d gotten a half-dozen JPGs off the tape.
I know a geek or two reads this, so I’ll give an anti-recommendation for Yosemite Backup for Linux. It is simply the most obtuse user-interface I’ve every used. It’s needlessly complex, hopelessly convoluted, and has all the feedback of a sensory deprivation chamber.
Perversely, the product’s tagline is “Backup Simplified”. Stealing from the playbook of the Great Vole of Software, this is pure marketingspeak that contradicts reality.
Now, I’ve never been a fan of tape backup to begin with. The media are fragile, stupidly expensive, and it requires special equipment—you can’t just walk up to any old computer and begin pulling files off. When you throw in proprietary software that stores data in a proprietary format, it’s just plain dumb.
Anyone ever hear of tar?
So far, we have 12 man-hours into a project that’s a one-line command in tar. Basically, “Take all the files on that tape and put them on this disk, please.” That’s all I want. I’ll sort ‘em out from there.
Trust me on this, once the files the client needs are off that tape, they’ll be using tar for backups from now on. And that tape drive will be replaced either a DVD burner, USB external hard-drive or sled-mounted removable hard drives.
/rant
Otherwise, the project for that client goes well. Last week while they were closed between the holidays, I upgraded the server, and upgraded the OS from Fedora Core 1 to CentOS 4.4. FC1 is no longer supported—even by FedoraLegacy, which seems to be disintegrating anyway. With CentOS, my clients are covered until 2012.
We also doubled hard-drive capacity and got Samba working right. After the files are restored from the tape, I’ll be setting it up to also serve their intranet.
