Back to Newsletters KEYWORDS= Davrom Consulting Newsletter - Issue # 41 - Dated: 14 May 2008 From the desk of David Clark This month I have touched on a simple backup strategy for Windows PC folders using DeltaCopy and a reflection on trying to keep the older applications alive on older operating systems. Having just come through a bout of the flu I can empathise with how some of the older application servers are feeling out there ;-) I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter. David.M.Clark UNIX Quote Those who don't understand Linux are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. Unknown c:\data So why is a Linux/UNIX newsletter showing a DOS/Windows path? For quite some time now I have observed customers who, when having crash recovery issues on their Windows PC, are then trying to locate all of their Windows application files (documents, spreadsheets, pdf etc). If they are lucky these are still under the My Documents folder but also may be located in the Desktop folder. One key issue is if the ID of the PCs login user (Windows username) has changed or if you do a restore installation to a PC that already has valid login IDs, the new storage location may be set to something different under Documents and Settings. For example a new folder called david.000 may be the new default folder instead of the previous david folder. (Mainly happens on XP repair installs and if you just follow the defaults). So you go through and you search around and then you put all of the bits back after quite some time of lost productivity. But a practice I have done for many years through the versions of Windows is to keep all of my application data in one unique directory: c:\data A better practice if you are running Samba servers is to store them to a mapped drive on your Linux/UNIX server. But if I must save anything to drive c:, by setting the default Windows document files location in products such as MS Office or OpenOffice to use subdirectories under c:\data (eg., c:\data\docs, c:\data\spreadsheets, c:\data\photos), I am able to backup this one folder (c:\data) and I know I have everything that _I_ want to save. I even move the default directory for e-mail folders in ThunderBird to c:\data\thunderbird. The discipline of storing all important documents to a folder that I know and use allows me to never lose anything I wish to recover in the future regarless of what goes on with the Windows operating system. Anyone who has had to dig around the folders and sub-folders, and the sub-folders of the sub-folders, to find important files that you need to keep should relate to this one. By using a unique directory called c:\data I can also backup this folder with our office system backup facility - please read the next article on DeltaCopy for a good reliable way to backup your Windows folders to Linux/UNIX servers running rsync. DeltaCopy In our office we backup to external USB hard drives which also allow us to store one of these off-site as well. The backup runs every night on one of our Fedora servers in our office. Until recently the Fedora server has used Samba (via smbclient) to collect folders on the Windows PCs to store locally and naturally be included in the USB backup. Our SCO and other Fedora/SUN servers backup to the Fedora backup server via rsync - nice and easy. But as Windows PCs are under the control of other people it can sometimes be days before the Samba routine gets a backup of the folders on the PCs as they may be switched off at the time of the Fedora server collection script runs. Coupled with the fact that the same data is being copied each time can also push out the time constraints to make it onto the USB drive in time (And let's not mention that Vista on one of our PCs doesn't like talking to Samba or the network from time to time). We are now using DeltaCopy which is a free Windows based utility that allows you to use "rsync" from Windows to/from Linux/UNIX servers. DeltaCopy is both a Client and Server. The product was written by a company called Synametrics and you will find many download sites by simply entering "deltacopy rsync" in Google. DeltaCopy can also act as a server and therefore you can backup to the Windows PC. DeltaCopy uses rsync and therefore is only copying the files that have changed since the last backup so time to backup is greatly reduced. DeltaCopy allows you to set a schedule of the time you want the PC to perform the rsync backup so no human intervention is required. Another excellent feature is that DeltaCopy can send an e-mail to advise that it has execute with the results of the copy process shown. A nice product for those who only need to copy specific parts of their Windows folder structure to a central Linux/UNIX server. I have yet to test the ability of DeltaCopy backups to be a complete restore of Windows (owing to Windows protection files etc) but it is certainly worth considering to help centralise protecting your application data. Older Operating Systems on New Hardware Over the last twelve months I have been increasingly involved with sites wishing to maintain their old UNIX/Linux server and the application(s) on them but unfortunately the hardware they live on is starting to fail. The older operating systems (eg., SCO OpenServer 5.0.4, SCO UnixWare 2.0, RedHat 7.0 are recent issues for us) start to face a new problem when trying to prolong their life and that is to do with the recognition of the latest or later hardware available today. The new motherboards, RAID controllers (SATA and SCSI), CPUs, network cards, parallel and serial ports may not be recognised by the older operating system. While you can possibly get the application to live happily on a new server with the latest release of the operating system, there can be issues with library file dependencies that the application simply must have - and have the version they work with (eg., MySQL, Progress etc). You can spend considerable time trying to 'trick' the application by modifying system symbolic links on the new operating system, but this can lead to dead-ends as well. In one case of MySQL, it looks like trying to compile it for the later operating system is the only road to take (oh to be on the bleeding edge). One solution we have been implementing for most customers is porting them to run in VMWare - VMWare allows older operating systems to see the new hardware in a more generic and simpler driver set and for the most part works well on any systems that don't need specific kernel driver access to serial/parallel ports for example. VMWare runs inside a newer operating system such as Linux or Windows and presents the generic hardware layer to the older operating system. In some cases just finding older hardware that is in good condition will also suffice and I have customers who have a "bits box" sitting next to the live server to allow swapping out of parts as the older hardware starts to give up. Most applications can keep going with wither VMWare or porting them to the newer operating system but these are certainly not without some challenges at times. UNIX/Linux truly does far outlive the hardware it exists on. Tech Tip Using locate to find files: locate is a quick and simple to use utility to help find file locations on your Linux server. To locate any files with the name davrom.com in them, I would simply type: locate davrom.com if the list is quite large, then I can type: locate davrom.com | more There are some useful options to the locate command: locate -c davrom.com will show how many files match this pattern without showing the file names/paths. locate -i davrom.com will show you files that match in uppercase or lowercase. Back to Newsletters 
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