urBackup episode 3

• Windows backup ended fine.  Other incremental backups have followed during the few times I boot this laptop under Windows 10 instead of Linux.  So far so good.  I've also tested a restore (one JPEG file), that went fine as well.
• I need to do something to save the config of the server itself I guess.  BackupPC provided the localhost host by default to do that, but the urBackup server doesn't have a default client on the server itself apparently; will check if I can install a Linux client on the same box and make that happen.
• The rtcwake script seems to work fine on kid2 too.  I enhanced it a bit to check for loadavg because it should not shutdown while the load average is anywhere above idle; so i don't need to do specific checks about urBackup processes and so forth
• One day I'll have to look at the email configuration too.  That's definitely broken by default for a home network
• The kid2 hardware looks like a good idea to start migrating to urBackup while not removing BackupPC immediately.  The only problem is I will need one more "big" hard disk before I can add any more clients to urBackup.

xscreensaver slide show with Flickr image stream

OK, pretty simple to do actually. The most difficult part was to find out what my Flickr ID was again.

luc@kid2:~$ grep imageD .xscreensaver 
imageDirectory: https://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=125435399@N06

urBackup episode 2

I need more space for urBackup and no space for /home (I want to get rid of this home directory anyway). So unmounted /home, remounted it under /mnt, tried to move everything on the /home (in root filesystem), noticed that there wasn't enough room there because of all the cache and trash in there, did some cleanup then moved the rest... ok, I also moved the urBackup data on this 300Gb hard disk. Then changed /etc/fstab, remounted the disk under it's new location, restarted the urbackupsrv service... got some permission denied... changed the owner:group on the mount point, restarted the service again... that appears to have worked. I left the backup for my test Windows client running. It's quite big (lots of photos and videos) but hopefully there will be enough room this time.

Puppylinux on the Hercules EC-800-H20G/S

Rebooted this old little fellow. The crunchbang linux was still happily running. No real update path I guess (crunchbang distribution has been replaced by something else apparently) so why not trying puppylinux on it. First attempt failed (I had used the same SD card as for kid2... except that the eCafé has a 32bit processor apparently not a 64bit one). Second attempt, after downloading rufus (to create the bootable SD partition) and a proper 32bit Puppylinux image, was OK. I did a full install, but got stuck in the wifi activation. Even after remembering to use Ctrl+F1 to activate the wifi interface, I couldn't connect on my WPS access point. Will have to try harder, maybe on another AP, somewhat later. In the meantime puppylinux seems happy on this old hardware. I'll have to check how to reduce the X resolution to match the hardware panel which is rather limited on this eCafé. And/Or hook it up to an external monitor and hoping to get a little bit more pixels that way.

urBackup proof of concept

So far I had not tested this solution because it wasn't available by default in the Ubuntu repository. However after my problems with RsyncD on Windows 10, I figured out that maybe another backup solution should be (at least) investigated, just in case backuppc wouldn't do well with Windows backups. I didn't want to go back to SMB backups if I could avoid it. urBackup looks like a nice, open source, polished solution. It is client-based (e.g. a client package has to be installed on each machine to be backed up) but at least it seems to support Windows very well (and I still have to test the Linux client which is essential for my needs). It promises to support backup compression and de-duplication although it is not clear what level of support (at least for compression it relies on the underlying OS and filesystem. Ext4 is not doing that AFAIK). So after adding a PPA, I was able to install a server for testing on kid2. The server configuration was pretty easy (email won't work but that's not urBackup's fault). I downloaded a client on run12l and set it up real quick, then the first backup started. I had to stop it before it could complete, will need to come back to it later.

NFS/SSH/RSYNC issues linked to DNS / DHCP

The NFS & Backuppc server was using DHCP but with a fixed IP configured in the DHCP server (in the router). Sometimes this box was unable to resolve names of other machines on the LAN. I tried fidling with /etc/nsswitch.conf without success. I decided to move from DHCP to fixed IP since the server IP is fixed already anyways; So I also removed NetworkManager* and used /etc/network/interfaces to setup the eth0 interface. I also re-enabled the cronjob to suspend (shut down) the server when idle. Then on the next day I noticed a reboot (clock-driven) and tried to login after a couple minutes but the box wasn't responsive... I connected a screen and keyboard to troubleshoot the issue, just to discover that I forgot to add "auto eth0" in my new /etc/network/interfaces configuration. So after each reboot the server stayed offline :-\ Easy fix, now the hourly suspend/reboot seems to work fine. The script doesn't reboot in case a backup is in progress, or NFS clients are connected. To be verified after some more days.

Backuppc/RsyncD unresponsive on Windows 10

One of my windows backuppc clients is hanging during backups. On the status screen, it shows as "backup in progress" but no transfer PID is shown, and it takes ages in that state. Usually the user shuts down before the backup completes (and the status seems to stay the same). I upgraded RsyncD from 3.0.9 to 3.1.x, applied Windows Updates and rebooted. The next backup seems to have worked (in 80 minutes!) but has been interrupted again. To be checked. It might also be linked to DNS or interface problems (I'm currently migrating the backuppc server from a DHCP to a fixed IP configuration).