kid2 role, revisited

So on the ACPI side, the BIOS+LXde settings seem to be able to suspend the system, resuming (sometimes) with a double click on the mouse.  However this is not what I'd want from a server that is supposed to do "stuff" at periodic 1-hour intervals, like backuppc or my photo posting script.  So far powernap doesn't seem to do anything for me neither, so I removed it completely.

I tested IDE HDDs that were lying around.  Seems like the 500GB and the 200GB are both dead.  I'm left with an old 6GB to play with.  Mounted it on kid2, checked that there was no data left (moved some to kid2 home).  I also moved data from the Windows partition into the home partition so that I can prepare to attempt a Windows reinstall.

On the 6GB hdd I removed the old partitioning, created a single partition, and installed Puppylinux just to play with it, and have an alternate/backup boot method for kid2.  That distro is really damn small!  But quite functional as a intetnet/word processing box.  I might try that on my old eCafé that's sitting in my drawer awaiting for better days.  The installation media could be a single SD card, 512Mb would be enough...  I think the eCafé can boot from USB so that would seem like a piece of cake.

I like the internal hardware on kid2, and the way it allows to add many more 3.5" disks in the future if I wanted to.  The base hardware (packard bell) really has only one free spot left for that.  I'm starting to think about swapping roles for these two boxes.  Both could accept the USB3 PCIe card that I've ordered...  both hardware seem to be reliable still... I wonder how the slower CPU would work in the context of rsync/gzip/network backups; we'll see when I complete the backuppc setup by adding a few more clients on kid2's backup hosts list.

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';