Something Swift this way comes…

So anyways, life is going fairly well. I’ve finally found and joined a church where I feel at home. The folks there seem to accept me for who I am, and they don’t seem to judge me – that’s something that’s kept me from bein active in my faith for a long time…and I realized that I shouldn’t try to blame other people for my lack of effort.

On other fronts, I managed to do some really cool stuff with linux at work. I’ve set up a ubuntu server running a piece of software named Bacula and Partimage Is Not Ghost. Finally I also set up a service on there called PXE using tftp. This basically sets the machine up to be both a backup server (Bacula) which can back up any files from any machine running the Bacula client on a network, and a Image server. By ‘image’ server I simply mean that I can take a snapshot of any hard drive on a network (that’s where the PXE comes in) and save that image to disk, so that in the event of having to roll an installation of an OS and software back out to a given machine, it allows me to boot to the server across the network and pull the image directly to the hard drive. For anyone who has gone through the heartache of having to re-install an OS, then re-install all of their software and try to recover any and all data from a backup, this simplifies the matter greatly.

I know, geeking out right? I was so freaking excited when I finally got everything working together like I wanted it. The coolest thing about it is that all of that software is free and open source, so you can take an old box running next to noghthing in hardware and set it up as a backup machine. My next goal is to mount a shared drive across the network to the unit from a NAS (network attached storage) and have it save all the images and backups to that. That way the box is just a middle man server that does all the work. We’ve currently got it running on an (ancient) refurbished machine. The system specs are: p3 800 mhz proc, 128 mb ram, 20 GB hdd. The whole installation with all services and everything (including the Xubuntu desktop so other techs in the business can administer the box) averages out to about 3GB installation. You can’t even run windows in that small of a space.

I suppose that if I really put my mind up to it I could script the images and automate a process where every six months the machines re-image themselves back to state and pull the latest backup information, but if I did that there would be little maintenance work for us to do! *laughs*

So that’s some of what I’ve been working on lately, how about you? Drop me a line there in the comments and let me know how you’re doing.

S