Monkey Blog

when you grab and miss the branch

Hurling excrement: Ubuntu

July 25th, 2007

This week’s turd goes to Ubuntu whose bleeding edge development version (the “Gutsy Gibbon”) contains a version of GNU coreutils from over a year old. C’mon guys! You don’t have to follow upstream minute-by-minute, but running one year and a major version number behind (5.97 vs. 6.9) is just ridiculous. My beef? The pre-6 releases do not contain the “base64” utility which I really need for some KVM related stuff.

Oh, and a fart in the direction of Fedora, which still ships zsh-4.2. Admitted, 4.3 is “unstable” but it’s running fine on most other distros (see Ubuntu? Some things do get synced with upstream), and at least the Unicode stuff is fixed.

I’m cranky.

Had my CAKE and ate it

July 13th, 2007

Went to Tivoli in Utrecht to see CAKE on Tuesday 10 July. Great show, even though we had to stand around and wait for over an hour before they came on stage. We forgave them quickly.

Impressive musical skills, very loose presentation and a very appreciative audience. No fixed set-list, but also no songs on request, because, as John McCrea explained, “We are not a fancy jukebox.” They just played whatever they felt like at any moment. And there’s enough material to pick from, so we didn’t get bored.

McCrea’s little reflections on life, bicycles and the download-anything generation were maybe not hilariously funny, but they did provide short breathing pauses between the songs.

No new songs, although a new release is expected in August. Apparently most of the crowd consisted of long-time fans, because they happily sang along with the lyrics, which are not exactly what you’d call simple “lala-la” sing-along.

I guess CAKE didn’t make any new converts that night, but they did manage to strengthen the bond with a loyal fan base. I also don’t know whether McCrea really did break a rib shortly before the show, as he claimed, but if he did, he’s got my respect for playing through the pain!

Oh, sweet symmetry!

July 7th, 2007

Nothing to say, really, but dang, it’s 7-7-7 (whether you use the drain-bamaged US notation, EU, or ISO order), so I need to write something.

Today, I’ve been trying to beat Amanda into submission. No, she’s not my wife, girlfriend, sister, daughter or dog. It’s the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. It was probably “advanced” back in 1997 when hard disks were expensive and backing up to tape made sense. Nowadays, we back up to a big array of hard disks on an off-site server. Amanda, however, is still tape-oriented, so a certain amount of hackery is involved. Fortunately, the multi-changer and “file” tape type make this not too hard. We’ve actually got that part working. Splitting up large volumes so they can be backed up in a staggered fashion wasn’t too hard either. The trickiest part is getting Amanda to recognise and use exclude lists. I think I’ve got it now.

The /etc/amanda/DailySet1/amanda.conf file contains:

define dumptype hard-disk-tar {
    hard-disk-dump
    comment "Back up to hard disk instead of tape - using tar"
    program "GNUTAR"
    exclude list optional ".amanda.excludes"
}

And /etc/amanda/DailySet1/disklist contains:

1234	HOST /var_www_html_steven /var/www { hard-disk-tar include "./html/steven" }

Obviously, tar will look for ”/var/www/.amanda.excludes”, not ”/var/www/html/steven”. My first idea was to add a line like ’exclude list “./html/steven/.amanda.excludes”’, but this article explains why that wouldn’t work (there’s already and exclude in the dumptype definition).

This leaves two options:

Use a different dumptype, one that hasn’t got the ”exclude” statement, and use that type in the disklist file, specifying an explicit ”exclude” for each instance where it’s used.
Re-base the backup block in disklist to e.g. /var/www/html/steven.

I chose the second approach:

123	HOST /var_www_html_steven /var/www/html/steven { hard-disk-tar }

Let’s wait for tomorrow’s run to see if it works…

[Update 8 July 2007]

It works!

Fotozondagavond #15: Frog View

July 2nd, 2007

Not much time to play with frogs this weekend.

What’s that up there?

What the #@$!?

(click to enlarge)

More froggie stuff at: