I need to backup my laptop. Previously when using a Mac, I had a hard drive sitting in my office and would plug it in every morning and Time Machine would do it’s thing. A recent tweet by @rackerhacker said he was using crashplan, so I thought I would give it a go. Crashplan is pretty good if you pay for it. I am not so concerned about the ‘cloud’ storage, but would like incremental backups taken more often, so I could find files at previous dates and/or times, but that is not the major reason for me to have backups. Read more

Recently I needed to restore a MMM (MySQL MultiMaster) cluster after both databases become corrupted for various reasons. Evaluating the environment it was decided that we should use the current active node as a true state and use this as a replication point, and provide database backups so that transactions could be played back manually if required. We use Pecona Xtrabackup for a large number of clients and this was the case this time as well. Read more

Over the Christmas break, as I pretty much do every Christmas holiday period, I upgrade my MythTV set-up. I pretty much stick to Debian for the OS and pull the MythTV packages from Debian Multimedia. Once upon a time I used to build MythTV from source and make my own packages, but I am getting lazy and time is becoming precious for me in other ways. So this time I decided to upgrade Debian testing (Wheezy) as it seems to be pretty stable and nearing completion, so that I could install 0. Read more

Having solved a very interesting multicast issue at work recently I decided it was once again time to have a go at getting IPTV working from my ISP TPG. I used to run Bering leaf, but never found a package or could be bothered building igmpproxy (which seemed to be the way to go) for leaf, and so have never really sat down and looked into getting IPTV working properly. Read more

I look after backups using Commvault. While it isn’t my favourite backup product, it gets the job done, and does a pretty good job of it too. One big downside for me is the lack of a Linux console. Yes the GUI console application is a Java application packaged in a jar file, but unfortunately it is very Windows specific, to the point where it just doesn’t seem to work on Linux. Read more