My one pain point was state flapping. A service can go unresponsive for a fraction of a second under heavy load and come back right again. All to frequently my inbox would get swamped with problem…ok…problem…ok….problem…ok messages. By the time I’d log in everything had settled down. It’s not a perfect situation, but doesn’t warrant getting out of bed to repair either. Nagios has a flapping detection function but Zabbix doesn’t.

What I’ve found is that the AVG function can be used to average the status values (“1″ or “0″) over a given period and only trigger an alert if it drops below the alert value. For example

{server01:net.tcp.port[, 80].avg(30)}<1

will only trigger a second alert if the web server stays responsive for at least 30 seconds between outages. Also

{server01:net.tcp.port[, 80].avg(30)}=0

Will only trigger an alert if the service stays down for more than 30 seconds at a time. Further you can combine the two in

{server01:net.tcp.port[, 80].avg(60)}<0.5

to only trigger an alert if the service stays down for more than 30 seconds and only trigger an OK if it stays back up for 30 seconds.

Because my current work style is very fluid, where I hop between my office and home PCs, a laptop, a netbook and an iPhone, it made sense to try and keep my data where I could access it regardless of device. I basically have 3 categories of data: email, my web browser environment (bookmarks, stored passwords, history) and unstructured data (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, JPEGs etc. files). I use a few cloud based services to supplement these, but more on them another time.

Documents: I’m fairly neat when it comes to organising data on my laptop. Everything is in the My Documents folder. I used to use Beyond Compare to manually sync my desktop and laptop but for the last while I’ve been using Microsoft Live Mesh Beta to keep everything in sync automatically. A change or addition on any system ripples around to all the rest in real time. This means I can start work on a document in the office and seamlessly pick up where I left off when I get home without having to do a thing. On the new PC I just installed the Mesh client and left it to do it’s thing over night. It pulled my data from the online copy and placed it just where I’d expect it.

Email: POP is for noobs; IMAP is king. Seeing as Google are generous enough to give away 7GB+ of email storage I’d be a fool not to use it. A few years ago (pretty much as soon as it was available) I created an @garypigott.net Google Apps account and shoved all my email up there. Right now there are 118,527 emails, occupying 2298MB of space, and vitally, it’s completely searchable in exactly the same way you’d search the web using Google. I access exactly the same data using Gmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, and the iPhone mail client.

Web Browser Environment: My browser of choice is Firefox,  which is handy a) because it’s multi-platform and b) because of Weave. Weave is an add-on that moves your bookmarks, history and passwords into the cloud. You can install the add-on on each of your computers, regardless of OS and everything is kept in sync. Weave is open source, so surely some enterprising and generous developer out there will churn out a Weave add-on for IE, Opera and Safari…

I dug out my old order confirmation email and clicked on the link to Macromedia’s web store. I got redirected to the Adobe store login, where my old Macromedia login worked, and could go straight to my order history and not only re-download my purchase 4 years later, I could also view my license key! If only all online stored operated this way I’d shop online for software more often.

title Ubuntu
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

This has the effect of kicking off the bootloader on /dev/sda3 (i.e. the Ubuntu one) when selected, booting Ubuntu!

The factory installed Linpus distro is OK-ish, but it doesn’t get upgraded as new versions of the component software gets released, so still includes Firefox 2, rather than 3. Also, it tries to simplify things too much.

I tried installing XP Home, which isn’t as easy as you’d think because there’s no optical drive. I followed this guide to installing XP using a USB key, and after an age (well 2 1/2 hours actually) I had a working XP install. The problem is that this isn’t the speediest of hardware (the SSD in particular is woefully slow) so there’s a huge amount of tricks and hacks to get it running at an acceptable speed. In the end I decided to revert to Linux.

There are a few distros tweaked to run well on these systems. About the best is Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It’s an official branch of Ubuntu, so gets continuous support/maintenance. I ditched Evolution for Thunderbird, but other than that it’s pretty much perfect out of the box.

Version 1 had a web UI for day to day management (starting & stopping VMs, tweaking networks etc.) and a separate Windows application for console access. VMware tried to make an all powerful web UI for version 2, and integrated the console functionality.

There must have been a backlash during the beta, because they’ve included VMware Infrastructure Client at the last minute. It leads to an odd division of capabilities. On the VMware Infrastructure Client I can create a new VM or import an appliance, but I can’t open an existing VM. On the Web UI I can create a new VM or open an existing one, but I can’t import an appliance.

What’s happened is that in version 1 you had a web UI for management and a console application for maintenance. Now both functions are split between interfaces, which is a pain in the rear.

One of our favourites is Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. It’s a strategy game set in the distant future. You build and control an army and battle another army controlled by the computer or another player somewhere on the internet. It was fun until last Monday, when his Necron army so totally humiliated my Space Marine one that I gave up and ran away before he could wipe my army out. 

Clouds are cool ‘n all, but what ever happened to K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid!). Simple architectures go wrong in simple ways which are easy to understand and quick to fix. The team in MediaMax obviously didn’t fully understand what they needed to do to safely move all their customer’s data over, and everyone is out of a job as a result.

There are two elements to online security: data encryption and identity verification. If your data encryption is good enough it doesn’t matter who gets hold of your data. Being sure you’re sending the data to the right server adds to the security. Online backup typically deploys two layers of encryption: the data is encrypted using a key, and then the data is transmitted through an SSL tunnel that encrypts everything again. The SSL tunnel uses a digital certificate to verify the server is who it says it is. These certificates are issued by a trusted source, (Thawte, Verisign, Geotrust etc.) and provide the sender with a key to encrypt the traffic (the public key). Data encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with a matching private key, and vice-versa. Only the owner of the certificate has the private key.

Software on the user’s end should throw up a big fat warning if the certificate isn’t issued by one of these trusted sources. Unlike Carbonite and Mozy, Ahsay doesn’t throw up a warning and just sends the data anyway. A determined individual can create their own certificate and keys and trick your PC into mis-routing your backup to their server (DNS cache poisoning is easier than you think). This gets them through the first layer; the SSL tunnel. They then have access to the username and password (which are transmitted unencrypted, because the SSL tunnel should be secure enough). This in itself isn’t a huge deal except for one thing…… To make things simple Ahsay’s default behaviour is to use the password as the data encryption key! They can then log in to your account and download all your data and decrypt it with your key. Carbonite & Mozy also use the same password/key shortcut but at least Mozy throws up a warning and Carbonite refuses to go any further if the key isn’t genuine.

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!

The server originally came practically free with some disk arrays we bought a while back so I wasn’t expecting the best, but was still slightly peeved when I saw it only had a CD-ROM drive, so my copious quantities of DVD+/-R media were useless. Off I went to my local mirror and downloaded the “ia 64 netinst” CD image and I burned it to my last CD-R. I bunged it in the drive and hit the switch and it booted straight into Windows….. I tried a bootable Windows CD and it booted off that fine. Hmmm. So I Googled and found this. apparently if you want to use an E64MT CPU you need the AMD 64 bit install CD, rather than the ia64 one, which only works on Itanium CPUs. I’m off to the shop now to buy more CDs.

Re: Debian Installer on DELL PowerEdge 850/860

Outsourcing to a managed service provider is the only thing that makes sense if you’re small and have these functionality requirements. I could sign up with someone like Intermedia on a syndicated Exchange server for $125/month. ActiveSync (mobile device synchronisation) is another $2.95/inbox/month, and there’s loads more optional, but essential extras, like additional storage. Basically at the end of it you’re looking at €150/inbox/year, which is a big improvement, especially when it means that I’ve no hardware to manage, and no housekeeping to do.

Google have had their Google Apps for Domains suite out for a year or so now. You get Gmail with your own domain name instead of @gmail.com, a calendar app, a basic browser based word processor, presentation & spreadsheet app that allows multiple users update the same file simultaneously, and a Wiki. We started using it informally when they launched the “Team Edition”, that gave you everything but Gmail, so you didn’t have to move away from your email provider. The Premier Edition gives you 25GB inboxes for $50/inbox/year, and the standard edition, with conventional Gmail adverts and a 6GB inbox is free!

We went with Google and threw the switch last Tuesday and it’s bedding in nicely. Over the past week though a couple of “wouldn’t it be nice if…” things have come up:

• Full contact information, and not just name & email address would be good.
• Proper contact sharing would be nice. Contacts are shared, but only in as much as the auto-complete function can pull addresses from other employee’s address books when you’re composing an email on gmail.com.
• The ability to sync contacts with Outlook and mobile devices would be a huge step forward.

RSS was a lifesaver for me. I went out and bought FeedDemon and for a time I was happy. It would fetch all the headlines for me and display them in a list. I could click on the ones that interested me and they’d open up in the built-in browser, and I could mark everything else as read.

A short while I bought a laptop wanted to read my feeds there too. Fortunately FeedDemon had an answer. As well as using an internal database to store your list of feeds and what was read and unread, it could connect to Bloglines, a web based feed reader. Now I could read my feeds using a web browser and on my desktop and laptop PCs where I had FeedDemon installed. It wasn’t 100% perfect. Adding feeds was clunky, and it had issues if more than one location was accessing the data simultaneously (i.e. if I forgot to close FeedDemon on my desktop PC when I was on the road), but it was better than nothing.

Then Google Reader came along. It was entirely web based, and had decent hotkey support, so I could read stuff almost as quickly as with FeedDemon, and a lot faster than the Bloglines clunky interface. It was also 100% bulletproof. Being an AJAX application, activity was communicated back to the server in real time, rather than at the end of the session, so I never had to mark the same headline read twice. I preferred FeedDemon’s way of displaying feeds, where each feed had it’s own folder, and it was easy to go back to read headlines for review, but Google was overall an improvement, but still slower than FeedDemon.

FeedDemon have since been bought by NewsGator, who are another web based feed reader service in the same mould as Bloglines and Google Reader. The software can pull it’s subscribed feeds and read article data from your NewsGator account, so you can install it anywhere and view the same feeds, and what’s marked as read in one location gets marked as read everywhere, and more importantly, it does this reliably, unlike Bloglines. It’ll do nicely for the moment…..

Nick Bradbury: Why Use a Desktop RSS Reader?

Many of the old timers still called it ARPANET and begrudged the intrusion of undergrads into what was supposed to be a serious academic and scientific tool. We were the kind of people who would post requests for budgie roasting recipes to the rec.pets.birds Usenet group just to see how many people we could upset.

Boredom, thy name is whatever this game is called « Why, That’s Delightful!

As long as you top up with €20 a month, even the data transmission is free. In theory you could use up the €20 on Irish mobile calls (where 3 are about the same price as SkypeOut) and use SkypeOut for everything else, thereby getting very close to the absolute cheapest call rates anywhere….. on a mobile!

It seems that 3′s Skype client is actually a bit of a cheat though. These guys say that the software actually makes a standard local voice call, and it’s only at a central hub that the call gets routed over the Internet/Skype network. It makes sense, seeing as the Skype clone (IM+) that actually does a full Skype implementation has fairly major lag, due to the weedy CPUs in most smartphones.

Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Testing out the 3 SkypePhone

 VMware recently announced the first beta of their free low-end VMware Server 2. It is a beta, and as such the sensible part of my brain tells me to stay away and let someone else take the pain. Unfortunately the gadget & gimmick loving part of my brain made me install it on my mail/web/everything else server that had a perfectly functioning v1.0.4 setup. Bad idea!

Version 1 has this very nice web UI for monitoring, starting/stopping, and tweaking stuff, and a separate Windows/Linux application for creating new VMs and accessing the console of each one. Version 2 has dispensed with the application and instead relies on a beefed up web interface, with a browser plugin to display the consoles. Unfortunately being beta, the web UI is ugly and unfinished, and there’s so much un-optimised debug code the VMs run at less than half the speed they did on the old version. I run Debian Linux web, email and SyncML servers, a Windows XP desktop, and the odd test Linux VM, all on a single 2.4GHz Celeron Dell server that I got for free. Obviously the beta had to go…..

Rolling back the server and toolset installs was a bit long winded, but it was straightforward enough. What wasn’t straightforward was un-scrambling the network config. Each VM has at least two interfaces, usually bound to the host system’s wireless interface (I keep the server in my garage, where I can’t hear it, so there’s no Ethernet out there) and a “host only” LAN for NFS, backups etc. The reinstall remapped everything arseways.

VMware Server 2.0 Beta – VMware

Backups should be automatic. If a human has to do something to ensure your backups happen, then once and a while that human will do it wrong, so your backups are not 100% reliable.

Backups should be redundant. There’s no point doing a backup to a local disk, because it’s possible that the event that causes you to lose your data will cause you to lose your backup. he uses the example of Francis Ford Coppola, who had his laptop stolen earlier this year. Much of the data was irreplaceable, including a script for the movie he was about to start work on. He had a backup alright, but it was a USB hard disk. the thief stole the disk at the same time. A similar scenario I came across before was the company who instructed their sales reps to backup their laptops to CD-Rs. Unfortunately the reps had a habit of storing the backup discs in the laptop case….

Backups should be restorable. It’s an obvious one, but often overlooked. People diligently follow their backup procedure, but fail to ensure it actually works. With tapes this means frequent test restores, but tapes by their nature have a finite lifespan. The verification puts more wear on the tape and can damage the data while it’s being verified. Basically, even after you verify the tape you’re never certain that the act of verification didn’t damage the backup, so you need to verify it again, and again, and again…….

To be honest, it makes me feel a bit warmer in side that the solution my company offers ticks all the boxes….. Our online backup platform is a pure software solution, so there’s nothing to interact with. It just works in the background, and is monitored by the service provider, so it ticks the automatic box. Data is immediately transferred off-site over the Internet, so a theft or natural disaster isn’t going to take out your server and ours at the same time, so that’s redundancy taken care of. Hard disks can take a lot more read and write cycles than tape, RAID and high end storage technologies prevent data loss, and built in continuous integrity checking mean that backup data is difficult to corrupt and is spotted and corrected immediately if it happens, so data on our service is always restorable.

The Pirate Backup System – Network World

From Web Worker Daily

We’ve started to grow, both in head count and sophistication, so now we’ve got a lot more documents to manage and a lot more people wanting to manage them. Our documents are usually authored by one person, but in many cases require review and comment by sales, marketing and technical people prior to release. What would be great is something that would manage the workflow, with notifications and audit tracking, and integrate with our website to make the final result available to clients, all in a controlled manner. We need a Document Management System. Our company likes to use open source software wherever possible, so my first port of call was Google, which gave me the following:

• xinco
• contineo
• KnowledgeTree
• Epiware
• Alfresco

Most of the above are Java applications, which I really don’t like, and I’ll cover in a later blog post. KnowledgeTree is written in PHP and ticks all the boxes. Alfresco is a Java app, but it’s functionality is too good to dismiss straight away. Let the testing begin!

There is an optional second argument that will connect to a specific connection, but if I force it to use this new remote database, all the other queries after it will connect to the wrong database, unless I modify them to force them to use the correct database. Aaaaaggghhh!

The logical option is to modify the other bits of code, but it’s already been tested and verified, so I’m not touching it if I can avoid it. What I’ll end up doing is separating this new function out into a separate PHP script, that I’ll call with CURL and pass the necessary data in the query string. It’s not ideal, but it’s the only way to integrate the new function without making radical changes.

Phase one was to install a webcam in the office, so he could see and hear what was going on, but he couldn’t answer back, and it wasn’t what you would call mobile. They ended up building a remote controllable platform with a webcam, speakers and a touch screen on a pole, so he can roam the corridors, attend meetings and drop into coworkers cubicles just like he was there. He controls it all remotely using a joystick, and the touch screen displays a live feed of his face from his webcam. Some would discard the idea as a toy or gimmick, but I see this as a very workable solution to the disconnect often felt by those who work away from the office.

The Record via Slashdot

I moved servers recently, so this site is now running on a web server VM in my attic. One thing I noticed afterwards was that I stopped receiving spam, or more accurately, Akismet stopped listing spam. Either the spammers forgot where my blog was, or it was borked. I don’t want to risk loosing valid comments due to a false positive, so I need to change my comment spam prevention method. Hmmm…

Because of this we had loads of different options if you needed email. You could use an “enterprise” platform like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and the like, or you could roll your own with any number of SMTP, POP or IMAP servers running on Linux (my preference right now is Postfix & Dovecot running on Debian).

Now days you can’t easily get away with the DIY approach. E-mail is has to a large extent replaced voice & fax as the prime business communication method. We need to support huge inboxes, instant delivery of messages, access on the road, and near perfect uptime and backups. Most of these things can be achieved with any modern email setup, however some require a little help from outside.

Remote access is a major requirement these days. An executive feels naked on the golf course unless he’s got a Blackberry, a Treo, a Symbian or a Windows Mobile smartphone on his hip (mine is a Nokia e61). You’ve got three options if you want to get email onto these things:

1. Scheduled checking of a POP/IMAP server: It works, but there’ll be a delay because the message doesn’t get pushed to the device as soon as it comes in.
2. Blackbery Enterprise Server: Native support for Blackberry units, and add-in support for other platforms. It only supports Exchange, Notes, or GroupWise servers though
3. Microsoft Exchange Direct Push: Native support for Windows Mobile units and add-in support for other platforms. Only supports MS Exchange servers obviously.

The other major issue is how to back them up. You not only have to worry about DR backups, but also compliance. A nightly backup isn’t good enough any more. You either need to run a continuous backup or run a parallel archiving solution.

At issue here is that the remote access and backup requirements require 3rd party support. 3rd parties target their efforts where they’ll get the most business, so There’s no support outside the big three (Exchange, Notes & GroupWise). Nobody’s deploying new Notes or GroupWise installations anymore, so as much as I hate to say it, Exchange is the only option if you need to provide effective remote access and require effective backup.

I came across OpenPsa recently and it seemed perfect for what we do. It’s a CRM tool with heavy project management and document repository tools that could be perfect. It runs on a LAMP stack, so I don’t need to dedicate a server (or VM) exclusively to it, like I would do if it was a Java app.

The one thing I always look for when choosing an Open Source product is the commitment of the developers. I’ve been burned in the past by committing to platforms only to find that the lead developers have no interest in improving the product or fixing the bugs. The most recent posting on the news page was a link to a blog entry of one of the lead developers on a Saturday stating that the 2.0 release was coming out the following Monday….. That was last May. He has updated his blog since, but no mentions of OpenPsa in any of them. There is no updates since about developers falling out, selling out or dropping dead. It’s the software equivalent of the Marie Celeste. Too bad. I’d have loved to play around with it.

I “upgraded” to Vista a couple of months ago and it’s a crock, but it’s not enough of a crock to make me reinstall XP Pro. Today was the first time I wanted to move a serious chunk of data between my laptop and the desktop. I plugged the cable in and nothing happened. Then I remembered that seeing as I formatted and reinstalled the desktop, I’d need to set n IP address, so I went into the network and sharing center in control panel….. The wireless adapter was there, as was the wired NIC, but no sign of the FireWire interface. I knew the FireWire card was set up because my iPod has been connected since the upgrade, so I checked Google to see if anyone else had the same problem. I found this. Microsoft removed the feature because they have “not identified any customer dependency” on this feature. Bastards!

VMWare Command Line Tools from VM Back is an unofficial open source command line version of VMWare Tools that enables you to shrink your disk images and sync your clocks on any Linux, DOS, BSD or Solaris VM.

Install a bare-bones Etch system by skipping the role and package selection screens during the installation.

Edit the apt sources.list to include the “contrib” and “non-free” packages by adding the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main

Run “apt-get update” to get the package list up to date.

Run “apt-get install sun-java5-jdk” to install Sun Java

The JAVA_HOME environment variable needs to be set for any Java app to run so adding the following to /etc/profile will do the trick

JAVA_HOME=”/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun”
export JAVA_HOME

Run “apt-get install tomcat5.5 tomcat5.5-admin tomcat5.5-webapps” to install Tomcat

Run “apt-get install wget unzip” to install wget so we can download jbilling from the server, and unzip so we can decompress the archive.

“cd /opt” and run “wget http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/jbilling/jbilling-1_0_6.zip” to download it and “unzip jbilling-1_0_6.zip” to decompress it.

Edit /opt/jbilling/server/default/conf/jbilling.properties to suit.

Run “chmod 700 /opt/jbilling/bin/*.sh” so we can start and stop the server easily.

Run “/opt/jbilling/bin/run.sh” to start the service and then open http://<IP_Address>/billing/signupEntity.do?action=setup in a web browser and follow the Getting Started Guide here.

This is easy as pie to set up in any desktop email client, but I check my email on the move with my Nokia e61, on my laptop when I get a chance to sit down, Outlook, Thunderbird, Outlook Express or Evolution when at one of my work desktops, and webmail everywhere else! Therefore I need the emails to be sorted on the server, before they get downloaded to an email client.

Sieve seems to be the tool of choice, but you have to compile it from source on Debian, which defeats the point. People use Debian because of it’s package management. I log into each of my servers each week and run “apt-get update;apt-get upgrade” and I know everything gets brought up to date. Having to manually track a specific application’s release cycle and bugs just makes things messy.

The search continues….

I know my PC isn’t the latest and greatest (a self built AMD Athlon 3700+), but it took 20 minutes to install this from DVD, and then it went down hill from there. I ran the game, created my account and logged in. I then got kicked out to download a patch to v1.12.0. This 485MB file took 2 hours to download… Finally! I can log in!…. I logged in and the same thing happened again. This time a 600MB+ v2.0.1 patch, which I left running overnight. This morning I logged in to see if it was finished…. It had! Result!!!…. but now it needs to down 200MB+ of other patches….. Hopefully I’ll actually be able to spend some of the 14 days playing the game, and not just watching progress bars while stuff downloads.

Asigra supports Fedora Core, Red Hat ES and SUSE ES. I don’t like Fedora for a number of reasons, and this is for home use so I’m not paying for RH or SUSE, so I’ll use CentOS, the free clone of RHES. I’ve allocated a 4GB disk file for the VM. The OS itself should fit under 1GB, but the Postgresql database can hit 2GB, so I need the space. I’ve allocated 256MB RAM to the VM, but backups will run a lot faster with more.

At the OS “Installation Type” screen, you select “custom” to keep the disk footprint as small as possible. Disable the firewall and SELinux. On the Package Group Selection screen, tick the box for minimal install and complete the installation.

The application requires Postgres, so firstly you install it with:
yum install postgresql-server postgresql-jdbc

You need to run it once to build the database and create the config files
/etc/init.d/postgresql start
does the trick.
To make postgresql launch at boot, I use “chkconfig –add postgresql“, “chkconfig –level 345 postgresql on” and to confirm “chkconfig –list postgresql“. Postgres needs some minor tweeks for Asigra. you must add the line “tcpip_socket = true” to postgresql.conf and “host all all 127.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 trust” to pg_hba.conf. You then need to restart postgres to load the new config by running “/etc/init.d/postgresql restart“.

The client has some other dependencies that get resolved by installing “yum install compat-libstdc*” The client installer must be run with the “-console” switch unless you’ve installed X. Agree to the EULA and accept the default install path of “/usr/local/DS-Client”. We’re only going to install the DS-Client on this box, with the Java DS-User UI to be installed elsewhere. We’ll select a normal installation. The self contained install is an evaluation mode where everything is stored locally. We enter “localhost” for the DB host, and “postgres” as the username. We can put in anything for the password. We also want the service to start at boot time. It is normal for the client to give a warning about a missing database during an initial install. At this stage you get prompted for username, client ID and server location. These would be provided to you by your service provider.

The next thing is the encryption level. Asigra supports everything from DES (very weak, avoid) right up to military grade AES256. AES is slow, and the higher the key length, the slower the progress. I usually go for AES128. It’s significantly faster than 256, and it will take millions of years to break, rather than trillions, so it’s still good enough. Asigra uses two encryption keys; a key specific to the PC and an account key shared amongst all backup clients on the WAN. This enables common files to be encrypted and stored once, with this common key, rather than multiple copies being stored with individual keys (inefficient), or all sites sharing a single key (insecure).

Installing it on Debian is a 2 liner if you read this page. “apt-get install procmail” and adding “mailbox_command = /usr/bin/procmail -a “$EXTENSION” DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/ MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir” to the postfix config file and it’s done! Now all I have to do is dump my old procmail configs back in and I’m in business.

My next option was to try VMware’s new free VMware Server application. It installs as just another application on a base OS, so if the OS supports the wi-fi card, VMware will. It’s a fully virtualised solution, so stock OS kernels interact with the VMware server application instead of the hardware. It takes 10 minutes to install and it works just like having VMware Workstation installed on a local PC, only with the additional benefit of the VMs staying running when you disconnect from the server.

The server is now up and running (it’s a Dell PowerEdge 400sc, with a 3.4GHz P4 CPU and 2GB RAM) and is running 2-4 VMs. A Debian Etch email server (Postfix/Courier-IMAP) and a Debian Etch web server (Apache/PHP/MySQL) are running constantly, and I run a Windows 2003 and/or CentOS VM when I need to.

Now installing a driver on Linux is more involved than Windows. If the driver is supplied as a binary, it needs to match the exact version of the OS kernel. Not a huge problem if like Windows the kernel changed once every 4 years or so, but with Linux you could change the kernel every week if you really wanted it, and anyway, different distros ship with slightly different kernel versions.

To get around this, most drivers are supplied in source code, to enable you to compile it yourself to match your kernel. To do this, you need the kernel header files. You can download the kernel headers using the standard “yum install kernel-devel” method, but they’re the wrong ones! It wuldn’t take a lot of time to get around this, but I’m not going to bother, because I’m only going to run up against something else. I’m just going to install Debian Etch on the box and manually set up Xen tomorrow.

Installation and management of the open source version was a bit on the tricky side, so a proper company, XenSource, was formed by the development team to add some polish and make it easier to deploy and manage. They’ve finally cranked out their first release, and it’s better than anyone expected. An extra bonus is that not only are there two commercial versions, but Xen Express is a free cut down version for the enthusiast and developer.

Installation is a snap. Basically all you need to do is boot an existing server from the install disk. It will install the core application layer under the existing OS and transition the OS into a virtualised one. I’m moving my email server onto meatier hardware in a few weeks and my intention all along was to use Xen to have multiple virtual machines for testing purposes. Xen Express just made this a lot simpler. Instead of yet again doing a full OS setup and data migration, I’ll install Xen onto the old server and translate my mail server’s OS into a virtual machine. I’ll then transfer this VM onto the new server, which will already have Xen Express pre-installed. It should turn a full day chore into a 30 minute exercise.

And why in God’s name does it insist in popping up a “you must reboot your PC to complete the process” dialog box that you can’t hide behind other windows with only an OK option!!!! Even when Windows does the same thing it softens it with a “Reboot Later” option. My PC takes about 5 minutes to reboot (it’s my home office PC, so there’s a lot of “stuff” running at start-up), so this one simple little job ended up taking me away from work for over 45 minutes. Aaaaggghhh!

And another thing…. What gives Symantec the right to try and scare me into upgrading to Norton SystemWorks or Norton Internet Security? The status screen says I’ve got “No Coverage” for data recovery risks, and “Limited Coverage” for Performance, Web Browsing and Email & Messaging. I’ve got full coverage thank you very much; just not with Symantec products! I want my AV status display to tell me how I’m fixed for virus protection. I’ll go to my backup client to see how I am for “Data Recovery”. Bastards!!!!!