Dustin Rue

One thing that a number of people overlook is that RAID is NOT a backup solution. That’s right, say it with me, “RAID is not a backup solution.” RAID is at most a data availability solution and nothing more. With that in mind it is always good to have a backup. This post will concentrate on creating a backup script and routine for my Linux server as well as my Mac. Since the Mac is UNIX based I can back it up in much the same way as I do my Linux server.

Please keep in mind that this method assumes a lot of things and should not be considered for a business environment where security is more important. My method involves creating a public/private ssh key without a passphrase and worse, the root password for my MySQL server is also coded into this script. Since this is all DIY, you can expand whatever you do to be a bit more secure.

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I am in the process of setting up a box for someone and I thought I’d document the software RAID portion of it a little bit, in case it is helpful to anyone else.

I’m a bit of a command line junkie so it should come as no surprise then that I prefer to setup my software RAID sets using the command line tools available. The system in question this time is a newly installed CentOS 5 box. In this article I’ll concentrate on creating a mirrored set.

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After loosing a hard drive I thought it was time to look into upgrading a little bit. At home I run two systems 24×7 to take care of a couple of things. One provides me with a place to do the little bit of freelance work that I do. It’s an old Dell server running Fedora Core 6 on a single 40GB drive. The other one runs Ubuntu and is my MythTV/file server and is the system that lost the drive.

As I explained in a previous post, the plan is to replace the four 80GB drives with a pair if mirrored 500GB drives. I’d also like to cut back on the number of running systems in the house so this box will also either host my dev work directly on Fedora 8 or, by using XEN, run another instance of Fedora 8. I’m hoping that the new setup will still provide me with the network speeds I’m used to from the Mac Mini (~42MB/s) and provide the services I’ve grown used to while using less power. I usually look down upon the idea of spending money to save money but with one less machine running and three fewer drives spinning I should come out ahead by a good margin.

Late last week I found out that I had lost a drive in my striped RAID array. I had four 80GB drives setup as a striped set for speed. The array stored things like ripped DVDs, music, downloads and most importantly any video that I was editing on my Mac. I knew the risks of going RAID0 so I had backups of my most important stuff but it’s still a loss in time all the same.

I was originally using the four drives in a RAID5 set but performance was too slow for editing when combined with gigabit speeds. I also needed the space at the time. To replace the drive, I actually decided to replace all of the hardware as well. I’ll be moving from a P4 3.0Ghz to a Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz with 800Mhz front side bus. There are quicker options out there but this will certainly be an upgrade from what I have, while using less power most likely.

For drives I’ve ordered a pair of Samsung 500GB drives which I’ll mirror. I didn’t really feel shorted on space before so 500GB will still feel like an upgrade and I’ll be able to take advantage of mirroring to help protect the data to some extent.

I have an online photo album that, when a file is uploaded, will create a thumbnail size and an intermediate sized photo along with the full size version. I needed to copy the full size version of the file out while skipping the thumb and sized versions. I was able to accomplish this task using a single command:

[root@drue Wedding]# for I in `ls | grep -v sized | grep -v thumb`; do cp $I /var/www/html/pics/; done

This would have taken a lot longer using any other method. Using a GUI, say, Windows Explorer, I’d still be selecting which files to copy by the time the above command completed the work.

I’m a little slow on adopting the latest Internet trends. I have no idea why but I seem to get stuck on last years hot item and then I never seem to hear about the latest and greatest until it has created a lot of buzz. I also have a tough time seeing the value in some of the new items until some very smart and crafty people put it to use in such a way that it really reveals the power of, well, whatever is the hot button item.

RSS is one of those things for me that just didn’t really catch my eye outside of using del.icio.us RSS feeds to keep my bookmarks in sync between my computers at work and at home. In reality, I’m not even using del.icio.us correctly. At any rate, the value of RSS has hit me like a ton of bricks.

I browse a number of newsish sites related to Nintendo, Apple/Mac, digg.com and a number of blogs. I visit these sites just to see what is new. For a long while I’ve used Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature to keep up on sites that had RSS feeds but now it has just gotten out of hand. I have too many sites and blogs I like to check.

Enter Vienna for the Mac. This thing is spectacular. It looks great, it’s very fast and it allows me to group RSS feeds into any arbitrary group I wish. Apple/Mac feeds in one group and Nintendo feeds in another. Reading feeds is simplistic though I opted for the ‘condensed’ layout rather than the default ‘report’ layout. In the condensed layout it’s very much like using a Microsoft Outlook with mailboxes on the left, messages in the middle and the full message on the right. Now if I could just find a comparable program for Windows I’d have my new RSS fetish fully satisfied.

I picked up the above mentioned monitor a couple of days ago. It’s a 22″ flat panel, 1680×1050 native resolution, 2ms response 3000:1 contrast ratio (using dynamic contrast). Sounds great on paper but is actually surprisingly bad in practice. What I’ve learned is that virtually all 22″ monitors use the same type of LCD panel, a TN (twisted nematic). These panels are cheaper than the other types available and have the poorest viewing angles of all available types. For some reason this panel is raved about on the Internet and gets top picks in reviews. Maybe I’m overly picky compared to most people but it really bothers me to see different colors on the screen depending on where I site, and even worse to see contrast so different between the top and the bottom of the display. My laptop’s display suffers from the same issue, but on such a small screen it’s hardly an issue. With a screen this large, it’s not acceptable.

I ran into two strange issues with Leopard on my mini. For whatever reason, importing video via firewire would drop frames. I’ve never seen dropped frames while importing video with firewire, I didn’t know it was possible. It’s possible there really is something wrong with the tape or the camcorder but it seems to play back perfectly on the camcorder. The other issue is a drop in frame rate while minimizing windows. This sounds pretty trivial but it was actually pretty annoying. It was nearly as bad as running OS X 10.3 on a 400Mhz G3 iMac.

Anyway, I removed Leopard and reinstalled (erase and install no less) Tiger. It still wants to drop some frames, but not as many.