I’m Bitching
Backup! Backup! Backup!
I managed to carry my gear for the entire last month without any damage, but Sunday night at the train station my camera back fell off my other baggage down on the ground. I hurried and checked my camera gear… everything O.K. *phew*.
Today I wanted to copy my images from the mobile HDD that I had to carry with me (because I didn’t have a Laptop with me, Thanks Dell!!!) to dump my images from the cards to it whenever possible. But… Click – Clack – Clack – Clack. DAMNIT! Headcrash!!!
Well, you can imagine that I was about to throw the HDD out of the window, but then decided to make a copy of it using ‘dd’ first. ‘dd’ went through the first 50GiB without any problems… but then the HDD started clicking again. I was able to recover some photos from the unfinished dump and there is still 4GiB of photos on one of my SD-Cards, so cross your fingers! Hope it’s just the video clips on another partition that I lost!!!
What does this tell us? Always have a backup!!!
On my past trips I always had one copy on my Laptop and then dumped the photos to an external HDD which I carried in another bag. But without a Laptop this wasn’t possible this time.
Here’s what worked best for me in the past:
- Import and copy your images to Lightroom as usual
- Close Lightroom, go to Finder/Explorer and copy your Picture & Library folder to an external HDD
- Store the external HDD somewhere safe
- Now you may format your memory cards
This way you always have two copies of your photos. I also usually formatted the external HDD every night before I copied my backup over. If you’re running Mac OS X you could also use TimeMachine to automate it.
Dell Crappiness
I heavily shortened this article… it just happened way too much between Dell and me to tell everything.
In Summer 2008 I bought myself a Dell XPS M1530. An actually pretty nice and very fast laptop. I mean… the first one I received was damaged, the touchpad wasn’t in place. But they managed to sent me a new one after a month or so and I was happy again.
Six months later I even wrote an almost totally positive article about the laptop, though they already had to change the fan once on-location.
Now, another 14 months later I have a totally different opinion about Dell. Since Summer 2008 I had 6 repairs. Not that that isn’t enough, but their pick-up service usually doesn’t show up in schedule and even if they do… all they tell you is “be there between 8am and 6pm”. Once they didn’t even show up, and another time they came two days earlier then scheduled so I haven’t had any chance to erase my data. Surprisingly exactly that time they changed the HDD, which actually worked fine. (More about that soon) Ah and did I mention that it takes two weeks until you get your laptop back?
But I’m not even at the worst point. The last two service requests were only needed because the technician damaged my laptop. The first time they bent the alu-cover, the second time the display cover and the HDD was damaged (Yes, they changed my HDD, kept my data and installed a damaged one!).
Now let’s come to the strangest point: Because I insisted on some kind of compensation for the damage on my laptop they generously offered me a one-time on-location repair which I should pay for!!!!!! Wait? I shall pay to get your mistakes fixed?I Errr… no! I then told them I contacted my lawyer and all of a sudden their so called “head of department” wrote me a mail that they would do a favor and do a one-time on-location repair for free to get things finally fixed.
I accepted… the technician showed up with about 12 boxes of spares. And changed everything except the screws and the DVD drive. Lol!
It now works well again, but decided to sell it. It’s caused too much stress.
Ah and here’s a short list of all the repairs they had to make in the past 20 months:
- Replace Fan (on-location)
- Replace Fan
- Replace Mainboard
- Replace HDD (came back with damaged Alu-cover)
- Replace Alu-cover (replaced Display, HDD and Alu-cover – now Display-Cover and HDD are damaged)
- Replaced Alu-Cover, Display-Covers, the entire case, Motherboard, Fan and HDD – on-location
Their eMail support is also pretty much a joke. You write with people somewhere in Bratislava, which don’t have any power to decide anything. All they do is clicking together platitudes. It took me 5 mails until they finally understood that I want them to forward my mails to their principal.
I now sold it. No more Dell.
Spring Cleaning Time for my Setup
Last month really was a bad month for my IT. In just two weeks, my gateways CF card died, my server’s PSU and HDD died and my main switch now has 4 of it’s 8 ports failing so I finally had to send it in for service. I had no Internet, I had no eMail, no Intranet and no VPN, but at least I had backups of my personal stuff!
The one good thing about all that is that I now had time to re-organize everything. A few years ago I was very paranoid and decided to put everything I need on my LAN. Storage, eMail servers, Bookmark synchronization, Calendars, Contacts and so on. To get that but still keep my LAN secure I used SSH tunnels, reverse proxies, virtual machines, subnet and vlan separation… My LAN consists of many single points of failure: A single Internet uplink, a single gateway, a single switch and a single server. Internet uplinks can go down, gateways can fail, switches can fail, servers can fail… all this leads to SSH tunnels going down which leads to services being unreachable even when the rest is back up.
Today I’m no longer that paranoid. I learned a lot and now decided to outsource the important stuff. I needed a solution suitable for a poor man which means I can’t afford redundant dedicated servers or even co-locations.
I already got to work with Google Apps and so I decided to mix it with shared-hostings and someself-hosting.
I’m mostly back up. My gateway is re-installed, serving me Internet access, firewalling, VPN and a reverse-proxy.
Sometime next week I’ll restore my Server to serve Files and the Intranet website, Databases and an internal Mail-relay, do backups and some other things using KVM instead of Xen (more on that to come!).
What do I want to tell you with all that? Be prepared. Have backups. Keep it simple.
Stay tuned. Some new tutorials and ideas about VPNs, certificates and my new little love nginx will follow.
help.ubuntu.com links to my blog
I was just comparing the current status of KVM, Xen and some other virtualization techniques when I came across the Ubuntu Help for Xen. The page states that Ubuntu still doesn’t provide a Xen Dom0 Kernel in their latest release, but that doesn’t surprise me becaus Xen still didn’t make it into the official Kernel… maybe because everyone loves KVM that much. But they link you to a blog post which shows how to run Xen on Ubuntu anyhow.
Noticed it? Yes that’s my article. I was really surprised to see a link to my actually pretty provocative article on an Ubuntu site. They could have also linked to bderzhavets article.
So… that’s it for now. I’ll continue comparing virtualization techniques with the help of debian-user-german and will hopefully begin with the reinstallation of my xen host.
Performance issues of this Blog & what's wrong with OVH's RPS
Hi guys & ladies 
I know it’s been quite silent in here during the last few weeks, but I was quite busy and everytime I had some spare time to blog my damn web-server caused some problems…
O.K. I have to admit I’m a student that doesn’t have much money, so I went with a cheap pseudo-virtualized machine called RPS from OVH, which has only a small Intel Celeron CPU with 512MB DDR2 RAM. But that’s actually fine for a low-frequented website like this… if there wouldn’t be one major issues with these RPS’: The hard-disk is an iSCSI share connected through a simple FastE port, which wouldn’t be much of a problem if OVH didn’t oversubscribe their iSCSI hosts (at least it looks like they do). Sometimes the iSCSI drive is as fast as ~250kByte/s what makes it impossible to do anything. Of course I contacted their support and after about 4 days of total downtime (couldn’t even login through SSH) they rebooted the iSCSI host, what – so they believe – solved the problem… You might have noticed that it did not.
So… I asked around a bit and got an impressive amount of feedback of users who have exactly the same problem as I have. Sucks…
Long story short: I’m gonna quit the contract for this “server” (doesn’t really serve, does it?) and search for a cheap (yeah I mean inexpensive) alternative.
Please stay tuned in the meantime and subscribe to my RSS-Feed if you want (just wanted to mention this because hits per day have decreased to less than 50% since the server got that unreliable 
). Take care.
By the way: I’ve received the new Mac mini on Friday 
Linux hates me!
I started using Linux back in 2004 with SuSE Linux 9.0 and I liked it. When I upgraded to 9.1 (or 10.0? don’t know…) I got a bit disappointed, which is why I switched the distro. I installed Debian Stable (Sarge at that time), but I found the KDE version coming with Debian Sarge to be pretty old (or older than the SuSE 9.0 ones…I have versionitis you know), which is why I upgraded to SID. I knew that SID isn’t meant to run on production systems, but I got tired of the dependency problems ‘n stuff pretty soon… I then installed Gentoo on my Desktop and kept Debian Stable on my server which worked very well for more than two years. I mean… first time installation of Gentoo was a pain in the ass on my AMD Athlon XP 1800+ and upgrades (especially KDE upgrades) were annoying, but the system ran well and the rolling-updates were cool. I also learned a lot about the Linux internals like the kernel itself, using command line and editing config files… all the basic stuff which helped me quite a lot with OpenBSD and MacOS later on.
Everything worked well until I got p*ssed off by the compiling times. So I upgraded the hardware to a Quad-Core CPU and 8Gb RAM and installed Gentoo AMD64. Maybe that was a mistake: Flash didn’t work without hacks, Java browser plugin didn’t work, KDE applications crashed more often than on the old installation, GUI applications felt sluggish and the compiling times were not as good as I expected them to be (never figured out why).
Stop reading now if you don’t want to hear me bitching!
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Hi, my name is Chris. I am a wannabe photog, traveler & geek that lives in Hesse, Germany. more about me...
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