Posted by Doug
Wed, 26 Jul 2006 13:06:14 GMT
I’m amazed when I hear things like this: spill a drink, loose your computer, code not checked into a repository, no backup. I don’t mean to pick on this one guy. It feels like I hear of this about once a month. How long have we known about hard disk failures? How many times have you heard you should back up your data? How many of you do?
For more than 90% of us (Mac users—there must be a good solution for others as well) the solution is simple: buy an external disk and SuperDuper!. The first backup is somewhat painful, but after that it only takes about 10 – 15 minutes. You can even schedule it to happen while you’re not using your computer.
The combined price of the drive and software is less than $125. That’s a pretty cheap insurance policy for when disaster strikes. Nightly backups are great for peace of mind.
Oh, another piece of advice: don’t leave code on your computer not committed to your source control. If you think it’s going to take a while to get done, branch your code but still check it in often.
Posted in Mac OS X, Hardware | Tags backups, SuperDuper | 2 comments
Posted by Doug
Wed, 19 Jul 2006 18:31:06 GMT
Today while I was working at the Apple Summer Camp my Macbook Pro suddenly shutdown three times without warning. All three times I actually lost work (not to mention time to reboot). The geniuses at the Apple store said it might be my battery and swapped me a new one. Something said in passing is that the Macbook Pros (and I assume Macbooks) will shut down when they overheat. Mine has always run hot and I’ve not done anything to correct it. Also, while at the store I was using the machine on my lap or sitting flat on the wooden bench in the training area. I highly suspect my shutdowns were due to heat.
At home I use Griffen’s iCurve and love it. When I’m away from my desk I don’t have anything to help ventilation around my machine. So, I’m fairly tempted by something like MacAlly’s icePad. If you have any experience with some type of portable work surface, I’d like to hear about it.
Posted in Hardware | Tags Apple, MacbookPro | 4 comments
Posted by Doug
Sat, 24 Jun 2006 15:11:35 GMT
I have a server that is euphemistically called “seasoned”. He’s definitely due for a refresher in both hardware and software. The operating system install is over two years old and is an ugly mix of Debian/woody and lots of backports. Part of the reason we put off upgrading him is fear of what that process would look like going to a clean Debian/sarge setup. We’ve tried cobbling together various pieces parts to make a test server to upgrade but had numerous problems often related to troubleshooting the test server remotely. Enter Parallels.
We finally got a working solution by setting up a virtual machine using Parallels on our Mac. So we have an image that represents our current server configuration. We can boot that and share the console via VNC. Once the box is up, we can ssh into it as any other box. Since it’s on a private network, we went through all the places where our real server’s IP address was hard coded (mainly in DNS entries). The result was that this box performed exactly like our production box on a private network. We then went through the upgrade procedure over several sessions on several days.
Last night we finally got the last pieces of the test server upgraded and working properly. Not a moment too soon either. Tomorrow Dave and I are scheduled to be in the NOC where the server is located. We’ve got a second CPU to add to the server, double its memory to add, and more hard disks. That plus the OS upgrade should make things pretty nice. Really, the box is mostly idle as it is. However, during daily cron jobs it can get pretty sluggish mainly due to backups.
Since we still have the original VM image, our plan is redo the upgrade one more time. We’re much more confident about the process than we were two weeks ago. One more go at the process and it’ll be rock solid!
Posted in System Administration, Software, Hardware | Tags debian, parallels, virtualmachine | no comments
