Day 23

Nothing new to report, people. Kubuntu's been working nicely for the last week or so with no major showstopping glitches. Or, more accurately, I have found ways to work around its major showstopping glitches and accepted them into my life, much the way I did for Windows' major showstopping glitches.

This morning I decided to try and get my uber N-way backup system up and running again. Back in the dark days of That Other OS, I had a nice double-redundant backup system running. My laptop (let's call it "A"), the manager node of the Linux cluster ("B"), and a USB external hard drive ("C") were the relevant repositories of information.

Primary information on A was backed up to a second hard drive in B via the network.
Primary information on A was backed up to C connected to A.
Primary information on B was backed up to a second hard drive in B.
Primary information on B was backed up to C connected to A, via the network.

Migrating to Kubuntu on the laptop threw a bit of a spanner into the works, mainly because A was the center of operations for all backups, and the software I was using was made for Windows only (boo hiss). Luckily all was resolved with rsync, a clever little app that has been part of *nix since the good old days of the primordial ooze. Rsync copies files, or batches of files, or directories full of files, and so on, while cleverly comparing files for newness and only copying if the source is newer than the destination. This, along with some Samba share entries in fstab which took me several tries to get right, put A right back in the game as the hub around which my private little backup universe revolved.

I now have a little bunch of scripts I can run to do either a full everywhichway backup, or any of a number of partial options. It's not beautiful, y'understand, but it works.

Also - ordered some extra memory for the laptop. Hopefully kicking it up to a gig will improve the Firefox and other issues a little. I'll keep you informed...