kid2 recovery

Once I hooked up everything from screen to mouse, kid2 wouldn't boot.  I juggled the RAM around a little bit, now both on same-color sockets, then it would still not boot but at least display a BIOS error message on the screen.  So I loaded the "Safe defaults" then "Optimized defaults" (whatever these are) and it worked.
The Windows partition still doesn't work (reboots when I try) but Ubuntu Wily (15.10) is still there.   I had to look a little bit around in order to find a mirror that still had Wily files but then "apt update" worked (except for some ubuntu-security stuff) and I launched "apt dist-upgrade".  That's going to keep it busy for a while.

The only thing that doesn't work right now (in addition to Windows) is the mouse (still a ps/2 ball mouse).  I need to recycle that thing.

• /dev/sda seems to be a single-partition linux disk (mounted at /home) of size 300G, by Seagate
• /dev/sdb is smaller (160 Gb Hitachi) and partitioned as follows:
• sdb1 12 Gb= Windows recovery
• sdb2 80 Gb= Windows (broken), may still contain some data
• sdb3 4,2 Gb= swap
• sdb4 38 Gb= Linux (root)
• CPU is a E2140 @ 1.60 Ghz
• There are 3 free PCI slots
• There's an (unused) IDE interface on the motherboard
• There are USB slots available, looks like 4 USB1 controllers and 1 USB2 controller
• The Realtek Ethernet controller claims Gigabit ethernet compatibility
• There is no built-in graphics card, but an AMD/ATI Radeon is on the PCIe slot

Backuppc archives timeout problem + new archive HDD medium

So I took delivery of my new Maxtor M3 2Tb USB 3 drive yesterday.  Still the server only has USB 2 ports so I know this is going to be still slow until I can upgrade that.
However I hooked the M3 and it powered up and connected without problems.
fdisk showed a single partition (1.8Gb) formatted as HPFS/NTFS.  I moved the contents to /home/luc/Texts/Manuals or somewhere like that.  It contained some backup software and the documentation apparently.  Then I reformatted using ext4, and changed the partition type to Linux 0x83 (and removed the bootable flag).
Afterthat I used the UUID (from blkid) so add a new line to /etc/auto.removable and it just worked under autofs.  created the backuppc directory and will use that in a new backuppc archive host.
But before that I'd like to fill the iomega HDD with some recent backup archives so that I can move that out of site.  I noticed my previous attempts all failed after 20 hours exactly so after googling a bit I found out about the Client Timeout setting in Backuppc.  Changed this to 48 hours and started a new archive again, from kid3 backup.
To be continued...

kid2 status

I didn't try booting but I opened the (unbranded) tower to check the motherboard model (GA-945PL-DS3) and installed memory (1Gb+1Gb+512Mb of DDR2 PC2-6400). According to the Gigabyte site, this board only supports a maximum of 2GB anyway, so I removed the 512MB DIMM.  I'll need to get a power cable and hook up a screen, power cord and mouse to try and reboot it.  I'll probably need to reset my overclocking attempts in the BIOS too.  On the other hand, I now have switches and Cat5 cables around so I will not need to play with the cheap Wifi dongle that I found back in one of the USB ports.  I didn't bother to check wich hard drives are installed (2xSATA drives are connected).  As there is an IDE interface too, I could also install some more disks in there if needed (doubtful).
I really should try and find a SBC capable of replacing base with a much smaller environmental footprint... but then I'd still need power adapters to feed the drives that I need.  So probably a dead end route.  I could also re-test the power management (powering off via cron when not in use and waking up hourly).  That was kind of fun, but unfortunately it sometimes froze and I didn't troubleshoot that to see if I could easily fix it or not.

Ubuntu 17.10

Last month I upgraded kid3 & run12l.  No issue, even got the latest Darktable etc so I didn't need to add any ppa so far.  Yesterday I also upgraded base so all OK for now.  I took a look inside (this is a Packard Bell B2501 BE).  Still spare room for disks (both SATA-several connectors free and one free IDE connector) and cards (no extension cards on the motherboard, using the on-board audio and video circuits).  There are 2 PCI slots and at least two PCIe slots (1x and longer).  There's also only 1 DIMM slot used and thus the second one is free.  Looks like this required DIMM DDR2 800.  Iirc the CPU is an E2200.  There's an unused HDD in that box, with only Linux partitions (/ swap /home probably) and it's about 200GB.  It still works (I connected it temporarily for testing) and seems to have data from 2014.  I think /home is empty though so nothing to save from there.  Could probably be used as recovery boot in case of failure of the main SATA HDD.

I ordered a PCIe 4-port USB3 card to install in this box in order to speed up the archives so I can start rolling out with my off-site backups.  I also bought a Maxtor M3 2Tb USB3 external hard disk (at Black Friday prices, 63€) but I still have to pick that up.

I might buy a used monitor screen to replace the one used by kid3 so I can move that one to base in order to troubleshoot a boot failure that I had when the IDE drive was connected (seen as /dev/sda).

Automounting removable USB disks for use as backuppc archive volumes

I want to be able to plug in a few (at least 2) removable HDD drives and use them to store my latest backups, so I can easily move these HDD drives offsite for additional protection against theft, fire or other catastrophic events.

Required software

 sudo apt install autofs

/etc/auto.master 

#

# Maps for external HDD etc 

# 

/var/backups/backuppcv /etc/auto.removable --timeout=2 

/etc/auto.removable

Currently I own two of these drives (Iomega is 1TB and Targa is 512MB).  Both are quite old but I plan to add a 2TB (or a couple of them) in the near future.  I did check the blkid from each of these drives then added these lines to my new auto.removable config file:
#
# Maps for external HDD etc
#
iomega    -fstype=ext2    :UUID=e66dd072-7a29-4021-8cea-6757bf3b566a
targa    -fstype=ext3    :UUID=bd524c4e-2c59-4685-9458-74b21a9c33cd

Activation

sudo service autofs restart

Permissions

mkdir /var/backups/backuppcv/iomega/backuppc

chown backuppc:backuppc /var/backups/backuppcv/iomega/backuppc

Usage with backuppc

sudo cat arc_iomega.pl
$Conf{XferMethod} = 'archive';
$Conf{ArchiveDest} = '/var/backups/backuppcv/iomega/backuppc';