My old backup method was a little cumbersome. To ensure a good backup set, I’d take down the virtual machine, mount the VM storage on the host (Xen), then perform an rdiff-backup of the entire file system, before bringing the VM back up again. This happened daily, automatically, around 3:30am. It has been working for over 3 years with very few hiccups. I’ve had to restore entire VMs and that has worked too. One day I needed to restore the Zimbra system ASAP. From the time I decided to do the restore until end-users could make use of the system was 20 minutes. That’s pretty sweet in my book.

There are some issues with the current setup.

• Backups are performed locally, to a different physical disk before being rsync’ed to the backup server. This is necessary because the backup tool versions are different and incompatible between Ubuntu 8.04 and 10.04 LTS servers.
• Each system is completely shutdown for some period of time during the backup process. It is usually 1-4 minutes, but still that is downtime.
• Most of the systems are still using 8.04 paravirtual machines under Xen. A migration of some type is needed to a newer OSes. I should use this opportunity to make things better.
• Some of the systems are running old versions of software which are not up to current patch levels. I guess this happens in all IT shops. None of that is available outside the VPN, so the risks are pretty low.

think I can do better.

Every year I receive a text message on my cell phone reminding me that my minutes are about to expire. For the last 5+ years, I’ve added $10 worth of minutes every October to keep the plan alive.

Just $10/year for cell phone use?

This month has seen lots of behind the scenes changes here. Most will not be seen by casual visitors. Anyway, I was going through the web analytics and noticed this section concerning the different plugins that are enabled in a browser when they visit here.

78.1% Flash Support
68.8% Java support
61.8% Quicktime audio playing support
58.4% Windows Media audio playing support
49.0% PDF support
09.6% Real audio playing support
09.2% Macromedia Director Support
08.6% Javascript disabled

For the last few years, I’ve wanted to move the Windows7 media center from a physical PC onto a virtual machine.
To accomplish this, I knew that I needed a few things setup and ready to go first.

• Virtual Machine Hypervisor that was stable and efficient
• TV Tuner device that worked from inside a VM
• Storage to hold the recorded files.

Life is too short to deal with filing (paper or electronic) very much. We all have better things to do with our time than waste it on excess organization. The goal is to locate a receipt or statement fast enough. Nobody is watching your filing – there is no test later. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I usually need to find a single document every year, no more. Minimal effort for maximum return is the goal.

At my day job, I’ve been doing some Android development. Due to the nature of the application, we’d like to connect the device to larger screens both directly using HDMI and by streaming through a DLNA client/server connection.

Anyway, I ordered a 10 foot HDMI cable off Amazon last week and it arrived today. After connecting the Android tablet to the TV and pressing “play”, I was happy to see the same thing displayed on the tablet show up on the 37 inch HDTV here. Pretty sweet …. until ….

A few times every week, we all get offers from the local cable company or telecom that has a low-low-low price in a 48pt font. The price is so low that we open the letter and read a little. I’m staring at an offer from AT&T right now, but it could be from the cable company just as easily.

$29/month for U-Verse TV +
HD-Ready DVR Included +
No Equipment to Buy!

Wow! That sounds like a great deal. How can I possibly pass it up? Then I read a little more, you know, the fine print.

For Six Months

So what’s the price after 6 months? Will they say?

I was reading an article on Lifehacker about adding fancy effects to a Linux desktop. Of course, they showed how to do it with 11.04 Ubuntu – which is unstable on my systems. Should I be without the wobbly windows? No! You shouldn’t do without either.

If you want smaller image file sizes at the same resolution, but files that still display nice. Check out the ImageMagick tool convert.

The size reductions can easily be 50% to 90% without a noticeable loss in quality.

Since this is a technology blog, I figure some of you may be interested in a major change that happened out of necessity here today.

This is the very first blog article on our new physical server, running in a completely different virtual machine. For the next week, everything here is a test.

Due to some sort of outage issue earlier today, I was forced to upgrade everything involved with this blog. I had attempted to perform this upgrade previously and failed. As you can see, this time, there was success. Nobody was shocked more than I.