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| 03:59.22 | *** join/#gllug Leeds (~Richard@203.143.24.25) |
| 06:42.32 | Cope | hello Leeds |
| 06:43.50 | rhowe | Morning |
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| 08:50.36 | Cope | hello chums |
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| 09:37.00 | *** join/#gllug SlayerXP (~Mart@burningchrome.demon.co.uk) |
| 09:40.27 | rhowe | Oh, this is painful |
| 09:40.37 | Cope | oh |
| 09:40.50 | SlayerXP | sorry |
| 09:40.55 | SlayerXP | inertING |
| 09:41.04 | rhowe | Someone called saying "Explorer doesn't let me access my smartmedia card any more. It says it's write protected" |
| 09:41.12 | rhowe | He insists there is no write protect switch |
| 09:41.25 | rhowe | However, he can access it using other programs |
| 09:41.28 | SlayerXP | tell him to call you back when something changes |
| 09:41.43 | rhowe | So, $boss has concluded that Windows is trying to write a Thumbs.db file |
| 09:42.05 | rhowe | So his logical conclusion was to teach him to use the DOS prompt to copy files off the card |
| 09:43.25 | rhowe | My suggestion was to use Irfanview's batch processing mode to read all the files from the card, and resave them to some destination |
| 09:43.34 | rhowe | Still, I didn't get the phone call |
| 09:43.50 | rhowe | Now $boss is getting fustrated and is throwing things around the office as $user is struggling to come to terms with a commandline |
| 09:48.04 | Leeds | afternoon Cope |
| 09:48.15 | Leeds | afternoon all |
| 09:48.38 | rhowe | haha |
| 09:48.57 | itsbruce | Morning |
| 09:49.06 | rhowe | $boss just said, after putting the phone down, "Yeah, great. Fucking thanks for all the help. If I could stab someone in the face over the phone he'd be number one on the list" |
| 09:49.23 | rhowe | Cope: Less highly as time progresses |
| 09:49.27 | Cope | good morning itsbruce |
| 09:49.28 | SlayerXP | rhowe: $boss is spending too much time reading bash.org |
| 09:49.39 | Leeds | itsbruce: /me is preparing to get to grips with AS/400 |
| 09:49.44 | rhowe | SlayerXP: $boss is spending too much time doing many things |
| 09:49.54 | rhowe | SlayerXP: Few of them are work-related though |
| 09:49.55 | Cope | itsbruce: nice post re trainig |
| 09:50.40 | SlayerXP | rhowe: http://bash.org/?4281 |
| 09:56.12 | itsbruce | leeds: Well, that'll be interesting. I have lots of time for IBM hardware |
| 09:56.25 | Leeds | I don't |
| 09:56.31 | itsbruce | More cautious about their software |
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| 09:56.53 | rhowe | I guess that's the "get rich after inventing a device to stab someone in the face over the internet" quote |
| 09:57.00 | Leeds | there are some interesting things I'm discovering about the setup here... |
| 09:57.11 | itsbruce | We use IBM blades and bladecenters extensively. Serves us well. |
| 09:57.29 | itsbruce | Also have some very nice IBM SAN kit. |
| 09:57.33 | SlayerXP | blades are a bit of a ripoff imo |
| 09:57.46 | itsbruce | Have not been for us at all. |
| 09:57.51 | Leeds | like, domino server for 30-35 users, running on a dedicated as/400 machine whose storage is so expesive users have small mailbox quotas, so they keep all their mail on their desktop PCs, which aren't backed up |
| 09:57.54 | SlayerXP | they're great if |
| 09:58.04 | SlayerXP | a) you don't need extensible hardware |
| 09:58.11 | SlayerXP | b) you put all your data on a SAN |
| 09:58.23 | SlayerXP | c) you have a datacentre designed to accomodate them |
| 09:58.33 | itsbruce | Well, we tick all three boxes |
| 09:58.40 | SlayerXP | most DCs do not have sufficient power or aircon to deal with that density |
| 09:59.54 | SlayerXP | the guardian went for blades and found their hosting could only have 2 blade chassis per rack due to lack of power and build up of hotspots |
| 10:00.18 | itsbruce | We combine the blades with a PXE arrangement that lets us repurpose blades with a reboot. Very flexible, makes it easy to arrange HA. |
| 10:01.00 | SlayerXP | itsbruce: *nods* that's what the guardian do |
| 10:01.25 | SlayerXP | I could completely rebuild any given machine in under 30 minutes |
| 10:01.50 | rhowe | *chuckle* |
| 10:02.03 | rhowe | $boss ordered some 2.5" to 3.5" IDE converters from Aria |
| 10:02.21 | rhowe | But they're not quite like the ones he saw in the photo, and now he's complaining bitterly |
| 10:02.48 | rhowe | They are a 3.5" plug to a 2.5" plug, which means that they monopolise the IDE channel |
| 10:03.03 | rhowe | He was wanting a 3.5" socket to 2.5" plug, so he could put two 2.5" drives on a single IDE cable |
| 10:03.40 | rhowe | (because that will solve the problem, obviously :) |
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| 10:06.08 | rhowe | Ah, no, it was him sending a post-haste email to aria |
| 10:08.42 | Leeds | they do say the photo isn |
| 10:08.47 | Leeds | isn't definitive |
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| 10:13.41 | rhowe | I'm sure they do |
| 10:31.32 | SlayerXP | "Dude, it's a Dell!" |
| 10:32.06 | highbury | first my main desktop machine (Onboard SCSI) one of my disks appears to be failing, the hard drive fails the onboard bios verification tests |
| 10:33.04 | highbury | then my external USB drive (Maxtor On-Touch) seems to be suffereing random corruptions, and Maxt don't provide any verification/diagnostic software |
| 10:37.03 | Cope | bummer |
| 10:53.45 | highbury | Maxtor have *some* diagnostic software for their external drives, but not for the model I bought at the beginning of the year |
| 11:19.22 | rhowe | heh, what a graph |
| 11:19.52 | rhowe | http://siksai.co.uk/~rhowe/backup-size-differences.png |
| 11:20.13 | rhowe | Bit hard to extrapolate much information from that :) |
| 11:20.28 | rhowe | Especially considering that I haven't labelled the axes or provided a key |
| 11:21.56 | eye69 | rhowe: For fucks sake... |
| 11:22.47 | rhowe | X axis is time, major ticks are weeks, minor ones are days. Y axis is % change since previous backup |
| 11:23.14 | rhowe | Where 0.02 =2% |
| 11:23.27 | rhowe | Each line represents a different backup job |
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| 11:24.21 | eye69 | Even with your explanation can I grasp that. |
| 11:24.48 | rhowe | It's a poor graph really. Gnumeric isn't so good at graphing |
| 11:25.01 | rhowe | In fact, in many ways, it's even worse than Excel 2000 (which is pretty shoddy) |
| 11:25.42 | rhowe | Would be better to graph a moving average too - the resolution is too high |
| 11:26.04 | rhowe | Take a look at the dark blue line, which is intermittent |
| 11:26.29 | rhowe | That shows that the data covered by that backup job is constantly growing in size, at a roughly constant 0.2% a day |
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| 11:36.30 | rhowe | The others are just all over the place |
| 11:36.49 | rhowe | And it's not helped that sometimes backups have failed (been tweaking the configuration, not always to good effect) |
| 12:08.55 | itsbruce | rhowe: How is the bacula experience going? |
| 12:09.23 | rhowe | itsbruce: Fairly well, although there is still some tuning to do |
| 12:09.35 | rhowe | itsbruce: I think I'm going to be filing a bug report soon, but need to test a few things first |
| 12:09.48 | rhowe | itsbruce: About to set up another instance of bacula in Singapore, with a much simpler configuration |
| 13:09.12 | morsing | Sorry - I've been away from me desk. |
| 13:09.18 | morsing | What's been happening? |
| 13:19.35 | Cope | I don't know - we were not at your desk either. |
| 13:20.57 | morsing | :-) |
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| 13:37.25 | JAV | hi |
| 13:38.28 | eye69 | rhowe: Have you tried Amanda as well as Bacula? |
| 13:48.42 | rhowe | Nope |
| 13:51.02 | eye69 | Ok. |
| 13:51.51 | rhowe | ARCserve and arkeia |
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| 14:56.33 | itsbruce | eye69: Bacula offers some things that Amanda does not. |
| 14:57.10 | itsbruce | Which is why I am interested in rhowe's experiments with Bacula, because I have run up against Amanda's limitations before. |
| 14:58.45 | rhowe | itsbruce: The trickiest thing with bacula is getting your retention times set just so, so that the tape recycling works as expected |
| 14:58.46 | George | death to Google. |
| 14:59.19 | eye69 | I'm currently using Amanda, and backing up to disk (LVM). I haven't looked into this, but I want to have file backups where I have say 2 days worth of hanges. |
| 14:59.22 | eye69 | changes |
| 14:59.26 | rhowe | itsbruce: And I'm having a bit of a challenge persuading it to only prune the database when I want it to prune the database, not when it wants to |
| 15:00.07 | rhowe | eye69: Well bacula can certainly do that (at least relative to a previous backup - not sure it can be told to back up only those files whose mtimes are >= 2 days ago) |
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| 15:00.40 | eye69 | rhowe: Ok. This is so that I don't notice now that a change happened 2 days ago, and the previous backup has been overwritten. |
| 15:01.47 | rhowe | Though, it was fixed in under an hour, which is pretty impressive :) |
| 15:48.49 | rhowe | itsbruce: http://siksai.co.uk/~rhowe/backups.png |
| 15:49.04 | rhowe | itsbruce: That gives you some idea of how disruptive my tweaking of bacula's options has been :) |
| 15:49.23 | rhowe | itsbruce: Fairly easy to spot where I had to cancel backups that were overrunning because they started late etc |
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| 16:30.56 | rhowe | http://siksai.co.uk/~rhowe/backup-size-differences-ma.png |
| 16:31.16 | rhowe | That's a graph of the difference in size of the daily backups, averaged over 3 days |
| 16:31.38 | pdr | perty |
| 16:31.59 | rhowe | Yeah, shame gnumeric doesn't do a proper curvy graph |
| 16:32.11 | rhowe | Only a bézier one, which isn't so appropriate |
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| 19:18.26 | highbury | dang! I think the battery is dead in my UPS (Belkin F6C525) |
| 19:20.07 | rhowe | Yeah, they do that |
| 19:20.16 | rhowe | And it's usually expensive to fix |
| 19:23.07 | highbury | I'd forgotten I've had it for nearly 5 years |
| 19:23.36 | highbury | do they do their battery replacement service in the UK (EcoBattery)? |
| 19:28.00 | rhowe | I would expect so |
| 19:29.07 | eye69 | highbury: You seem to be very unlucky with hardware. |
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| 20:52.42 | zachary | ello. |
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| 23:27.27 | morsing | 'evening |
| 23:35.08 | rhowe | 'night :) |
| 23:35.14 | highbury | evening |
| 23:35.30 | morsing | I thought everone had left... |
| 23:37.24 | morsing | Anyone else at work? :-( |
| 23:43.44 | highbury | well, since I'm sortof working from home, yes :-) |
| 23:45.11 | morsing | I just came in to spend 5h watching some IBM guys lay fiber cables under the floor :-( |
| 23:45.47 | highbury | I was crawling under my desk to extricate my UPS, which has gone tits-up |
| 23:46.27 | highbury | managed to cold-reboot my main machine several times, after knocking cables and pressing the wrong button |
| 23:47.03 | highbury | cold? hard? hmmm... not sure which is correct |
| 23:48.00 | highbury | <sigh> SuSE's decided to allocate me a new UID, do I change it back or go with the flow.... |
| 23:48.23 | highbury | perhaps its time for a internet-wide uid allocator |
| 23:52.01 | highbury | ok, lets change it back.... time to reboot, back soon |
