A busy week at work. I have been writing a new backup script that relies entirely on rsync and bash to do our backups and shut down our machines at night. I’m using bash to make sure that the folder I’m backing up is available over ssh, then using RsyncX to back up the folders on a rolling 14 day snapshot schedule. The clients then get shut down rather rudely with a “shutdown -h now” and the snapshots are committed to tape. I was trying to do some of this with perl, but I found I could do it all in bash a lot easier. That took a lot of googling. Apparently what I was wanting to do was so simple for normal bash geeks that it wasn’t worth documenting anywhere on the web.
Since I have a filemaker database that tracks all of my users and licenses, I just set up another layout and some new fields to generate the backup scripts with all the right names of folders and ip addresses. This should make it a lot easier for anyone replacing me to keep track of what’s going on. While nothing terribly complicated is going on here, it’s not as easy to use as retrospect. If I really cared, I could probably whip something up in Applescript studio or Python that would give me a nice GUI that showed all my users and what folders to back up and all that, but I don’t. Although it would be really cool if someone developed a GUI front end for RsyncX and SSH that made setting up and scheduling remote backups easier.
Maybe I’ll chuck up an article on TechGoesBoom documenting it all if anyone is interested.
There is some idle chat about heading out to Apache Lake this weekend, which would be a good thing for the old photography habit, but it’s going to be in the insanely hot range of temperatures, which makes me want to stay inside and do nothing. Damned sun.
Martial arts training continues, and 6 years of downtime takes it’s toll. I’m very sore. But in our last class we got to do some fun Ukemi (rolling) and rehash stuff from earlier in the week. I came a little early to class and got to watch some of the more advanced students practicing. They were learning a couple of techniques that I am already familiar with, specifically some pressure point stuff. I hope I’m not relegated to white belt action for too long. While I am out of shape from not training, my technique is still pretty good.
I’m going to do some profiling on my monitor and printer this weekend and throw some more stuff up on learningphoto. Been too long since I posted over there.
Listening To: “Airdrawndagger” by Sasha 