gary’s web sofa

A friend of mine has a successful small company. He’s realised that he needs “backup” because he knows he’ll go out of business if he loses his data. He claims that he doesn’t have the budget for online backup, and his staff aren’t computer literate enough to be trusted to swap a backup tape and store it off site.

I decided to use him as a guinea pig for Restore, and open source client-server disk backup platform. He has a reasonably powerful server in the office (I bought it for him) and a web hosting account with 10GB of space (also thanks to me). I wanted to set it up so it would backup the desktops to disk on the server, which I’d then rsync off-site. I’ve used VMware Server a lot, so the plan was to take Restore’s “VMware Appliance”, drop it on the server as a totally self contained virtual server, spend a 1/2 hour configuring it and I could go back to the day job.

It didn’t work out that way. The VM was created using VMware Workstation 6, whose VMs are incompatible with VMware Server 1.X. All they needed to do was click “VM” > “Upgrade or Change Hardware” before publishing the VM and everything would be fine. Now my 30 minute favour for a friend will balloon into a 3 hour job because I need to install it the old fashioned way. Grrrr!

There’s a big fuss in the US right now over amateur photographers being blocked from taking pictures of public buildings because they might be terrorists. If you whip out a pocket camera in any public space, the odds are that you’ll have a burly security guard demanding that you delete the picture within seconds. Now there’s no law against taking pictures, nor should there be seeing as your taxes paid for the things in the first place, but they keep harassing people anyway.

Fox News were interviewing a PR flunkey for Washington DC’s Union Station, and the PR guy was making a great attempt at persuading the interviewer until….. a security guard tried to stop them from filming!

via

Yawn! Yet another press release masquerading as news. This time StatCounter, an Irish provider of web bugs are bemoaning the fact that the majority of Irish publicly quoted companies aren’t using their service. Instead they’re using their server logs to track visitors, which is “complex, time-consuming and limited in what it revealed about visitors”. This is patently untrue. Even free stats packages like AWStats can track everything StatCounter can, and more besides. Now I may be a bit naïve, but why would you place an advert on your company’s website for a 3rd party (they track page hits by means of an embedded image, which just happens to be an advert that you have no control over), when any competent server administrator can install and configure AWStats in 10 minutes flat?

SiliconRepublic.com: Irish Stock Exchange firms not tracking web visitors

Jazz Biscuit is advocating taking cars off people who get caught for drunk driving. I like the idea. Maybe take it one step further and crush the car in front of them once they sober up….. on TV….. with a monster truck!

Jazz Biscuit: » Seize drunk drivers cars

Once I got Debian installed it was time to install VMware Server on the box. There’s two gotchas however.

1. While the application is fully 64 bit, the installer isn’t quite, and the error it throws isn’t the most illuminating.  You need to install 32 bit support by running “apt-get install ia32-utils”
2. You can’t connect to your freshly minted VMware server with the VMware Server Console. You get the error “There was a problem connecting: Cannot connect to host X.X.X.X: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it”. It’s because VMware-mui hooks into inetd, which doesn’t get installed in a bare-bones Debian Etch 64 bit system. “apt-get install inetutils-inetd” is the quick fix.