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!

I’m repurposing an old-ish Dell PowerEdge 850 as a VMware Server development & test box at the moment. It’ll be replacing an even older PowerEdge SC400 (where “SC” stands for “super cheap”). It was running Windows 2003 Web Edition quite happily, but I’d rather stick a stripped out Linux distro on it to get the last bit of performance out of it.

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

At work we’d been kicking around a migration from our IMAP/SMTP hosted email service for a good while now. Our provider was top notch, but we wanted shared calendars & workspaces too, so we needed to move on. We could have deployed something like Exchange internally, but that means buying in another server, Windows, Exchange, SharePoint and anti-virus software, getting it all put together, and then spending the time maintaining it and fixing it when it breaks. Our engineering resources are a) pretty much fully committed and b) not Windows specialists, so we’d probably end up subbing it out to a contractor. We’re a small bunch (9 inboxes and another 20 distribution lists and email aliases), so the €7k+ spend over 3 years (€260/inbox/year) to deploy this solution didn’t make much sense.

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.

Like many I read a lot of web sites. Back in the day almost the first thing I did every morning when I sat at my PC was go in turn to The Register, Slashdot, Dilbert, ENN, BBC News, ZDNet and about a dozen more to get my daily fix.

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?

This picture on Graham Linehan’s blog reminded me of the all-night MUD, Usenet & IRC sessions in UL’s VAX lab back in the day. Those who couldn’t go the distance woke up with a case of qwertyface. These were the early days of the Internet in Ireland (1991-1995), and IOL and the like were only getting started. Universities, via HEAnet, were the only connections to the net.

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!