rsnapshot, the remote filesystem snapshot utility, is a nice little tool. It uses rsync to copy a filesystem from one point to another, using a diff-based system to keep multiple snapshots and only copy/download the changed files into the new snapshot, leaving past versions of the backup(s) hanging around for as long as you want.

For example, you could have a set of backups made every four hours, another every day, another every week, and so on, for as long as you want to retain past filesystem states. And if a file never changed, there is only one file in the backup for all of the times it appears in your snapshots. Pretty slick.

My project today was installing it on leto, the NAS box here at home. It has over 2 terabytes of disk space, so it’s a perfect candidate for keeping all sorts of backups. Here’s a small little config, which copies what I think are going to be all of the important parts of Empty Matter:

/etc/rsnapshot.conf

snapshot_root   /share/snapshots/

# ...

interval        hourly  12
interval        daily   14
interval        weekly  8
interval        monthly 24

# ...

backup  root@emptymatter.org:/etc/              emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/home/             emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/root/             emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/var/www/          emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/var/log/          emptymatter/

That keeps an large (perhaps even excessive) number of backups in /share/snapshots/ (owned and only readable by root). We’ll see if it’s overkill or not, but I’m expecting a lot of my big files to not change, and thus be hard-linked multiple times without re-copying the files. But I’m always wishing I could go back to old config files, so this is an attempt to thwart future regret with that problem.

Other hosts will be added soon. Finally, I have a use for that NAS. :)

Edit: another useful link: Using Rsnapshot and SSH.

… then tore right through it.

Soon after Friday’s post, GNOME was installed. Excited, I restarted X, but was quickly demoralized by stumbling again across the X/hal/evdev Gentoo configuration issue-bug-thing. I had “fixed” KDE once before, but not, to my recollection, X in general. Long story short, after an hour of screwing around, I got basic X (that is, xev while inside twm or fluxbox) to properly handle my evdev-managed USB keyboard with the dvorak layout, but I cannot get GNOME to cooperate. I don’t know if it is trying to be overly clever, or there is some mystery config setting I can’t find, or it just hates me, but for the moment GNOME is seemingly unusable.

So instead I’m trying again Fluxbox, and rediscovering what I enjoyed so much about it in the first place. Simple and mostly out of the way, and nice-looking, to boot (I enjoy the Fluxbox look so much that my KDE looked somewhat like it for a long while). I don’t know if I’ll try GNOME again, or go back to KDE. For the moment, I’m pretty content.

Other random news: I did indeed buy that 8800GT (should be here in a couple days), I’m looking forward to playing Oblivion once again, and I also picked up Dead Rising for my 360, which slowly but surely is gaining more games and more play time.

Remember when I had all but sworn off video games?

Those were funny times.

KDE4 needs to improve. Sooner, please. My KDE3 install is feeling a bit behind, but 4 still has random bugs/issues (I can’t find the option to have the mouse wheel scroll through the desktop, automatic file preview in the open dialogs seems to be gone, Konsole performance blows, KWin exhibits random “that window doesn’t exist despite appearing in the taskbar” or “this window will always be on top, deal with it” bugs, so on and so forth.

I know it’s still in its infancy, but man, I need something new.

I’m installing GNOME. (What have I become?)

Also, I think I may buy an XFX PVT88PYDE4 GeForce 8800GT. The improvement over the 7900GT is supposed to be obvious. Maybe I can finally go back to a non-choppy Oblivion.

It’s time for changes, or something.

Thees murneeng ves system meeentenunce-a teeme-a, und I fuoond a neece-a leettle-a Vebeleezer cunffeeg sumeune-a poot tugezeer. Zee leest is a beet oold noo, boot it’s steell oone-a ooff zee mure-a cumprehenseefe-a SeerchEngeene-a leests I’fe-a seee. Huurey!

In oorder tu nut breek zee Internet, I’m gueeng tu leenk tu it unencheffereezed.

webalizer.conf with, among others, a nice SearchEngine list.

Börk! Börk! Börk!

(Tudey iff my persunel “telk leeke-a zee Svedeesh Cheff” dey, iff yuoo deed nut see-a yesterdey’s pust.)

The problem with having so many boxes to play with is that usually one of them gets a bit neglected. I still have a sort of love affair with my Mini-ITX router box, so that stays pretty regularly up to date, and my desktop is right in front of me most of the time I’m home, so I’m pretty good about that one too. The media PC not as much, but maybe once or twice a month it goes through the emerge rigors.

Which leaves Empty Matter.

It’s probably a good thing that I don’t touch it much, and I generally only (deep) update one component at a time, as servers like stability and all of that, and I don’t need to be taxing the CPU all of the time, but nevertheless, the Gentoo installation here tends to get a bit messy. And not by fault of Gentoo, do not get me wrong, but when you look at your cron logs and realize, by Cthulhu, I installed munin a couple months ago and forgot plum about it, that is not a good sign.

So last night (rather late last night, in fact) I decided I would try to fix a bunch of little bugs that have been showing up here and there. Most of them having to do with Apache, since that’s the majority of what this box does. Found some unnecessary 404s on the wiki because I never updated the default theme. Twiddled logrotate a bit so that I could actually have meaningful stats gathering.

Tonight is no different. Cleaned out my Apache root, removing some cruft and things scattered about following software uninstalls or my laziness. Removing some old cron jobs I no longer need. Checking my firewall configuration. Emerging a package or two while I’m poking away at random parts of the box. So very satisfying, this distraction of mine.

I had hoped to do a little analysis/plot of the Framewerk system as used in CthulhuTech, but my Perl coding went a little long and while I have plottable data, I’m not entirely convinced of its correctness yet, and I’m a bit puzzled how to plot the darn thing in the first place. Even when you factor in the three possibilities (highest single d10, largest N-of-a-kind, or highest-sum straight), there are bizarre holes in the results (did you know it’s impossible to get an 11? Or with five dice, there are 1,651 ways to get a 30, but only 45 ways to get a 28?) that don’t lend themselves well to a line plot. So suffice it to say that I have some verification left to do on these results before I go plotting. I hope to have that up tomorrow.

On the subject, I long for some CthulhuTech. Maybe this weekend…

… and in other news, other stuff rocks.

I bought another hard drive that I’m not quite sure what I’ll use it all for so that I could install Windows XP (so that I could install The Orange Box, which I also bought today). The hardware install was easy breezy, but XP was a nightmare.

The SP2 install disc couldn’t speak AHCI. Okay, fair enough. Switch the disk controller to IDE and get Windows going long enough to install the SATA drivers and switch back. No problem.

Noting, of course, that Windows cannot understand not being the first disk in the computer when it boots, leading to necessary GRUB hacks to keep things from getting confused.

Install otherwise goes well, I spend the time to get all the software and drivers updated, except for one small snafu: the Intel drivers for my disk controller won’t install. After some googling, it turns out that they’ll only install if they see SATA hardware. An annoying catch-22 when you need to use IDE mode to even get the OS installed.

I struggled with that for a bit before finding a helpful post about essentially bootstrapping the driver via a registry hack long enough to let Intel think everything is fine and install the driver proper. And that pretty much saved my install.

So stupid, to hear those claims that Windows is an easier install, and whatnot, when annoying shit like this still happens. I was, literally, running my hard drives in a degraded mode because Windows/Intel can’t — through normal channels — get the necessary drivers installed. And, come to think of it, I wonder if Aaron’s computer is suffering from the same fate, because I don’t remember having to dig into this stuff at all for his install.

It’s days like this that I love open source and easy (if time-consuming) installs.

I got Wine to play Civilization IV today. It’s hardly perfect, but it seems like it’s enough to allow me to play without having to reboot, which is great seeing as how I…

• …don’t have Windows installed and
• …forgot to make room on my disks for a Windows installation so I don’t quite know what I want to do about that.

Screenshot 1, screenshot 2.

If I knew a Wine developer, I’d hug them. Apparently at least part of The Orange Box works in Wine, too, and I want to play Portal badly. Really badly.

Oh, I nearly forgot, I followed these instructions (altered to use the newest patch/no-CD) to get the game up and running in Wine. Awesome.

Another GIMP fractal image, for starters. Whipped it together because I was tiring of my blue one.

With that out of the way, next is to mention that I have taken my friends’ suggestions and am looking at finally implementing the paper folding game (aka Storycraft) for the web, and this time I’m setting out to get everything mostly finished before releasing to the public. I’ve started a little design (yes, really) in Umbrello, hopefully it won’t be too long before I’m implementing.

Lastly, I neglected to mention that the other half of my Jpop shipment came: Ai Takaoka’s Sunny. Rie fu’s realm is the ballad, whereas Sunny is a much more energetic pop that borders on rock. Pretty good stuff. I love getting music on a whim. Which reminds me that I still have some eMusic surfing to do tonight…

I’ve been spending the past couple days doing two things: updating the installs on my various boxes, and gaming (well, okay, there was work too).

The big update is that I finally bothered to bring the MythTV network up to speed here, meaning I’m finally pulling from Schedules Direct for the TV listings, meaning MythTV is actually recording shows again. Very exciting, in a “hooray ‘normalcy’” kind of way. At least they dropped the cost from $15/3 months to $15/6 months. Next up on that front is getting Samba running on that box so that the lowly Windows slaves can get/put files. Although I would really like to get more of the network wired…

Gaming-wise, some marathon sessions of Arkham Horror were played on Friday; one was barely a win, another took hours upon hours but resulted in our greatest score yet. Some pictures are in the gallery. Also, my canned adventure campaign started yesterday. Dubbed “Expedition to Undermountainweb Pits” (until Peter comes up with a better name), it starts out as quite the PC devourer. The party spent a fair amount of time running and avoiding danger, but they’re on their way to getting through the first part of Undermountain, and gaining a couple levels in the process. I’m quite pleased by everyone’s intelligent play, for the most part. They’re certainly going to need to keep that up.

Finally, I’ve been bouncing around getting a new desktop for a while; it’s starting to show its age, and unfortunately

• AMD has been sucking lately, with no real return in sight
• the hardware has almost no upgrade path (AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, DDR1)

so I’m really only looking at a replacement of the big hardware bits. But, just because I’m dragging my feet on the hardware a bit, I’ve decided to split the upgrade into phases.

The first, which is already in progress, is to get a better speaker system with more balls (and also something a bit better shielded so that I’m not picking up christian rock, up here on the second floor), a new DVD-RW drive as my current one is at best failing, and a new power supply to replace the one the dog tripped over the cord for at a LAN party, making its ability to power the system on very spotty. To fill those needs, I went with the Logitech Z-5500, a LITEON DVD-RW, and a Thermaltake W0106RU.

Phase two, however, is gigantic; new motherboard, (almost certainly Intel) processor, and DDR2 memory. I don’t think new hard drives are in order, but it may happen anyway; in any event, I’ll need to make room for a Windows XP install for gaming, and reinstall Gentoo (new processor arch and everything). A new case may come too, as my current one is varying levels of frustrating. Phase three is a new video card, pure and simple.

So that’s my technology roadmap. In the pipe dream realm is convincing everyone I talk to on the tubes to switch to an XMPP-compliant IM network. A real Jabber service would be nice (such as *coughcough* my own), but even Google Talk would be better than the hodge podge of featureless, crippled, and closed IM services we use now.

Bunch of stuff happening today. Naturally, the big news in the world of Gentoo is the release of Gentoo Linux 2007.0, available on mirrors and torrent trackers now. I’m in the process of downloading the AMD64 and x86/i686 minimal CDs and LiveDVDs, and am looking forward to burning them to disc soon. I don’t immediately have any installations to do, but it’s of course a good idea to have the discs on hand, just in case.

I’m also free to admit that I had been cheating, running the 2007.0 profile on some of my boxes for a couple weeks now… Well, it’s not like it made much of a difference; just a couple changes to the default USE flags.

Also, with the release finished and 2007.0 out the door, developers have found the time for Gentoo Weekly Newsletters to be released and announced. I contributed to one, can you recognize my writing style? ;)

Finally, Gen Con’s event registration was today, and as expected it was hellish. Servers were timing out left and right, and I spent somewhere around two hours trying to get my events. I lost on a couple, but I got into the big games I was hoping to. If anyone else out there in Gentoo land or wherever is going to our great gaming Mecca, leave me a note one way or another, maybe we’ll bump into each other (hell, maybe you’ll be my GM).