Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. We recently upgraded our BackupPC servers to Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. It’s working almost perfectly. However, the “Download ZIP archive” restore option no longer works. This is due to a bug in recent version of the Archive::Zip Perl module which generates corrupt ZIP archives.
Read the rest of this entry »
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. I’m an engineer. I understand SSL, public-key encryption, man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, and certificate chains-of-trust. I look carefully at the URL bar before entering login or personal data, I don’t allow javascript to change the status bar, and I mouse over a URL and read it before I click. I’m paranoid as all hell, and I do not fall for stupid fraud schemes.
Read the rest of this entry »
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. As of Ubuntu Lucid, the Sun Java JRE has been replaced with OpenJDK. Unfortunately, OpenJDK still isn’t a complete drop-in replacement for Sun Java. For instance, the Facebook “Upload Photos” applet doesn’t work correctly; the photos don’t have thumbnails and can’t be rotated before upload. The solution is to install the Sun Java JRE.
Read the rest of this entry »
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. Since upgrading my media PC to Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”, pulseaudio can’t play files with AC3 audio. Unfortunately this includes all of my ripped DVDs, which were encoded with AC3 pass-through audio. If I play such a file in Miro, the video hangs after a few seconds. If I play it in Totem, the same happens but a pop-up is also displayed: “pa_stream_writable_size() failed: Connection terminated”.
I fixed it by downgrading Pulseaudio to the karmic version. Here is how.
Read the rest of this entry »
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. I recently discussed how to use LVM to make a live copy of a BackupPC pool. That guide covers how to set up LVM on a new server with no data. But what if you already have a working BackupPC install, and you want to move your existing pool to LVM?
Read the rest of this entry »
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Dad sent me a photo of his completed back tattoo:
He has charged me with preserving this tattoo by taxidermy, post-mortem. I haven't worked out the details yet, and it almost certainly violates some laws. But that won't stop me. Won't Dad look awesome over the mantle?
16 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. I’ve just bought a Logitech M205 wireless notebook mouse. Like my older MX650, this mouse uses the 27 MHz spectrum. The wheel doesn’t tilt, but it has a power switch and you can stow the receiver on the underside of the mouse. So far I’m very happy with it as a travel mouse. I’ll keep the MX650 for my regular work desk.
It seems Logitech is going entirely to 2.4 GHz for their mice. This is very disappointing, as the spectrum is so crowded. I’d love to switch, but the interference problems with wifi are horrible. The tiny “unifying receiver” used by their new devices is pretty slick too, but I doubt you could put an effective 27 MHz antenna in such a small dongle. Does anyone make a modern mouse which doesn’t use 2.4 GHz or bluetooth?
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. “How do I backup my BackupPC pool” is perhaps the most common topic of discussion on the backuppc-users mailing list. BackupPC stores all files in a common compressed pool (cpool, although I’ll use simply “pool” for this discussion), and maintains trees of hardlinks into the pool for each backup host. Therefore BackupPC requires a Linux/Unix filesystem. If you want to back up the BackupPC server itself, you must duplicate the pool, and the hardlinks to it.
Read the rest of this entry »
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. Not long ago we started having very unusual issues our email servers. Mail would be inexplicably held for delivery, bounce back, or fail to send for hours and then send without issue later. Some users couldn’t fetch email by POP until they restarted their mail client. We investigated the mail software, but weeks of investigation turned up nothing.
Around the same time, we also experienced intermittent problems logging in to MSN Messenger, and some users complained of issues accessing certain web pages, including a lot of HTTPS links. I began to suspect these were related.
Read the rest of this entry »
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
