Monkey Blog

The nominations for the Dutch Big Brother Awards are in (see the
Big Brother Awards website).

The Big Brother Awards are awarded to institutions, companies and individuals who promote privacy violations and it is much needed. There’s no equivalent of the ACLU in the Netherlands. We used to have a foundation called Bits of Freedom, but it sadly demised due to lack of funding and, apparently, interest. This is quite serious. In a time when our government not only fails to safeguard our privacy against outside intrusions, but also actively plans to intrude more into our personal lives, it is of vital importance to have an interest in civil liberties and rights. It seems, however, that we’ve been lulled to sleep over the years.

It’s a sad sign (or reflection of the general attitude) that most political parties do not seem to care about protecting the privacy of their voters. Those that do have an opinion, often have the wrong one, parroting the old, “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

Using the threat of terrorism and fighting crime as arguments, the government promotes the collection of more data about individuals and allowing easier access for various agencies. All that is combined with the fallacious belief in an infallible government, i.e.: only authorised people will ever have access to sensitive data and these people will never abuse our trust. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s the religious parties that have the least problems in believing this. After all, they already believe in an infallible higher power…

Linkage:

• Big Brother Awards website (English version)
• Bits of Freedom
• Privacy International
• Dutch Identity Campaign (BTW, the law passed :-()

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:

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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:

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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:

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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!

From the
Helsingin Sanomat:

A total of nearly 200 observations have already been made of a skin-piercing blood-sucking moth calyptra thalictri, which is relatively new in Finland. […]

Yikes! Unlike mosquitoes, where it’s the female that’s thirsty for blood, with
calyptra thalictri, it’s the male that does the dirty deed. It normally sucks juice from fruit and tears from the eyelids of large animals, but it seems the little critter is forcing its way into the mosquito’s niche.
Although painful, its bite is apparently not dangerous since the moth does not carry or transmit infectious diseases.

Still,

Once it ate my clothes.
Now the moth that flies at night,
Sucks my juicy toes.

– Steven

We already have the dreaded tiger mosquito in our country, I wouldn’t be surprised if we can welcome Calyptra T. soon as well
.
Sleep tight and yes, it seems the bed bugs do bite…