So you’re tooling along down the information super highway, you’ve got your emails saved to your harddrive, maybe all of your children’s photos from the last six months or maybe that important file your boss had you work on while you were on vacation. One day, you notice that your harddrive is beinging to make noises like the brakes on your first car (you know, that 1978 nova that you thought was Da’ Bomb!). You hear a scratching or a grinding coming from the drive and fearing the worst, you power your computer down before you copy anything to another disc or burn it to dvd (cd?).

Thinking things are cool, you give it a day or two to chill, after all, you know how it is when you work all day, sometimes you just need a day off, right? Except you power back on your computer and plowie (yea, its a word) your computer fails to see the drive, or it sees it except windows or linux can’t mount it. Then it starts to sink in, you have lost all your files. You try everything, you tap the drive in every location, you spin it on your desk, you freeze the drive over night in the hopes that the tip sites are right and you can salvage the drive long enough to copy your data off, except nothing works. Then, in a frenzied panic, you take the drive to a data recovery specialist (like Cherry Systems).

In general, these places can retrieve your data from almost certain death as long as your willing to pay. Most places start at a cost of around $500 and go up from there as high as $2400, but to you, its worth it if you can get back those precious files. Except this time, they can’t. The damage has been compared to the damage a brake rotor might see when the pads have worn all the way down and you have that wonderful grinding noise that you think you can live with for just a couple more miles… Then it hits you, you have the CD burner, and the blank CD’s why haven’t you backed anything up??

Thats what the wife and I are experiencing right now. We lost the secondary drive in our desktop at home, and it happened to have the digital photos on it from last year. Most of Emm’s first year, Grace’s 3rd birthday, Christmas and who knows what else…. gone because we didn’t copy our files to cd.

It would have taken less than 30 minutes to copy everything to cd, even less if we had been doing it as step two after removing the photos from the digital camera and its an expensive lesson to learn. As someone in the IT field, its been ingrained in me that backups are important (we keep customer files for anywhere from three to seven years here at work), we have software and hardware that handles all that for us when its working properly (thats another long post). However, from a home user stand point, I’ve always been of the opinion that it isn’t that important, yea I’ve lost files in the past (music, reports and other various files…) that I’ve just redone or found again if I really needed them, this is the first time we’ve lost anything along the lines of this and it really drives the importance of backing up, or at the very least copying the raw images to cd first.

I will say, Cherry Systems was very fast in responding to the drive and if we had taken it in or even copied things off of it when we first started having issues with the system we’d still have the photos. In the future, I’ll keep their business card close by in case I need something recovered….

Oh, and make sure you back up….

Ok, so I’ve been a fan of The Onion for a while… well, they’ve finally launched their own news network…

Onion News Network Promo

Linuxtracker.org is pleased to announce the availability of VL 5.8 SOHO RC1 on the linuxtracker bittorrent network. For faster downloads, more accurate statistics and to see all of the available torrents, please visit http://linuxtracker.org. Vector Linux is one of the more stable linux’s around.

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More ad goodness.

Unfortunately, they don’t quite raise the hair on the back of my neck like the ibm linux one did…

Linuxtracker.org is pleased to announce the availability of LFS (Linux From Scratch)6.2-5 x86 Live CD on the linuxtracker bittorrent network. For faster downloads, more accurate statistics and to see all of the available torrents, please visit http://linuxtracker.org.

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Linuxtracker.org is pleased to announce the availability of YOS-2.95 Blacksand-DVD (Yoper Linux) on the linuxtracker bittorrent network. For faster downloads, more accurate statistics and to see all of the available torrents, please visit http://linuxtracker.org.

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Linuxtracker.org is pleased to announce the availability of Foresight Linux x86 1.1 DVD on the linuxtracker bittorrent network. For faster downloads, more accurate statistics and to see all of the available torrents, please visit http://linuxtracker.org.

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Linuxtracker.org is pleased to announce the availability of ParallelKnoppix 2.5 on the linuxtracker bittorrent network. For faster downloads, more accurate statistics and to see all of the available torrents, please visit http://linuxtracker.org.

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Well… *she* is:

I think most linux users (the male ones anyway) would equate their linux boxes with a female personality….

Those that know me… won’t be too suprised…

Well, please make sure you include a cover sheet with your TPS Reports. Please?

We moved. Can you tell??

Ok, so I’m out of the office this week at a training course on the backup system. Yet, I still seem to be doing the work that I’d be doing if I were in the office. Answering emails, fielding support calls and what not. What gives? Some times I love technology (my XM radio for example…) other times I hate it (the wireless leash called my smart phone….).

Anyways, for those few people I wanted to include some fun stuff…. so… for a really really good photo of how much the moon is dwarfed by the sun, check this site out… for some awesome ways to die… and for some good reading in general…

So, I’m on a posting kick lately… where there wasn’t a post for months, now there are multiple ones in a day. Why? gotta make up for lost time.

Recently a bunch of the better known youtube celebs got together and made a video for BNL’s sound of your voice….

What else can be said??

I heard on the radio today that Hasbro is releasing a new version of the Game of Life this summer, with a Visa card instead of cash. Personally, I don’t think too much of this game to begin with as its nothing like real life, however, for those parents who use it to teach their kids about life, I think this is a bad move. Todays culture is one of “Buy it Now, Pay for it Later”. So much so that people today are drowning in debt more than in generations past, and it seems to be the Norm. Shouldn’t we be teaching our kids how to be financially responsible with good, old fashioned cash before we teach them about credit? Certainly, many of us as parents could use a lesson in how to be financially responsible before we even try to impart that knowledge on our children. My father always tried to tell me what I was doing wrong when it came to money and I never (ever) listened. All he wanted was to keep me from making the same mistakes he had, but he didn’t. We managed to get ourselves in some pretty good debt, and we managed with hard work to get out. Its my hope that by changing my habits, the lesson comes more, do as I do than do as I say for my children. Hasbro and Visa be damned.

Another thing that is driving me mad this week (besides the fact that every other post on digg.com is about dell putting linux on their machines) is the need that society has for warning labels on Crocs (you know, the incredibly comfy sandals). Apparently some kids too stupid to use an escalator got their footware and subsequentely themselves mangled by an escalator and now people are calling for crocs to come with warning labels.

From where I stand, very few products (and by very few, I mean NONE) should come with warning labels. If you aren’t clever enough to know how to get on and off an escalator, or that you shouldn’t put a plastic bag over your head, or take a bath with a toaster, then by all means, take that bath and make your toast at the same time. If you think blow drying your hair in the shower is a good, time saving idea, then GO AHEAD AND DO IT. Save some trouble for the rest of us.

Yar, this weekend, almost 2 full weeks earlier than years past, the sound of people waking up an hour late for Sunday morning Services (or work) will be heard across the country. If you’re operating on a windows based OS with automagic updates enabled, you’re covered. If your cell phone is set to use the network time, then providing your carrier is up-to-date, you’re covered. What about us Lee-noox users? Well, you can make sure you’re covered in a relatively simple way….

Open up an xterm (or aterm, or whatever term you like….) and type:

# zdump -v EST5EDT | grep 2007

The output should look exactly like this:

EST5EDT Sun Mar 11 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
EST5EDT Sun Mar 11 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
EST5EDT Sun Nov 4 05:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:59:59 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
EST5EDT Sun Nov 4 06:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:00:00 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

If that’s not the case, then do an ‘apt-get update; apt-get upgrade’ (if you’re on debian that is, you could probably do an emerge sync && emerge world on gentoo based systems…) and then run the command again. If that didn’t fix your issue, then there’s the NIH.gov technique (mind you this is all in the terminal:

1. su
2. cd /root
3. ftp elsie.nci.nih.gov
user: anonymous
pass: you@you.com
4. cd pub
5. ls
6. use ‘get’ to get the latest tzdata file like so:
get tzdata2007a.tar.gz
7. quit
8. mkdir tzdata
9. mv tzdata*.gz tzdata/.
10. cd tzdata
11. tar xzvf *.gz
12. cp /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.LAST
13. rm /etc/localtime
14. zic northamerica
15. ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT /etc/localtime
16. zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007

It should show Mar 11 and Nov 4 as the new times, in my case. My example above is only for the east coast of USA. If that’s not you, then modify for your timezone. Sorry I don’t know about other timezones, but you can grep the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory to see what else is there….

Note: This info was gleaned from UbuntuForums. Props to the original poster!

Please??? Please?

Please? Here, have some video…

Despite the fact that I’m not a big fan of his… Wil Wheaton actually has a decent post about some good linux resources out there. Recently, he tried linux out again and his findings this time were pretty good… though, I will say, he was using the current Linux Golden Boy, Ubuntu.

Got any more good linux resources for beginners? Let us know.

So I did something on a live production server (the web server here at work) the other day that I probably shouldn’t have done…. I ran yum update with out masking anything out of the update and then I rebooted the server. Needless to say, I learned why there are certain things (kernel and kernel sources) that should be masked when getting ready to automatically update your server.

On reboot, the server nicely suffered a kernel panic because it couldn’t find root. This stems from my custom partitioning the drives and setting it up the way I know how (with out the logical volume manager). I do this for several reasons, but mostly because I like it that way. The problem is most modern kernels and distributions do not support this with their stock kernels and grub installs any more… grrrrr. So I rebooted the machine and at the grub prompt, I selected the older kernel. Which is fine, we don’t need the bells and whistles of the 2.16.20 kernel (we’re on 2.16.18 or something…)

To counter this, installers such as yum, portage (emerge), apt-get, swaret… have ways to mask or protect certain packages from being upgraded. It does strike me kind of odd, that Fedora 6 doesn’t seem to by default…

Before upgrading world on your boxen, make sure to mask out any mission critical packages that could potentially ruin you if they’re done wrong…

So the RIAA must be spinning in their desk chairs… Amie Street Music is giving away music from independent artists as well as some well known artists for free. Well, for the first couple of downloaders free, after the song has received a certain number of download requests the price to download goes up to as much as 98 cents based on the song’s popularity. Its a pretty cool idea that if it works could be really cool. The artists receive about 70% of the price while the site takes a little to help pay its bills.

According to the site:

Our pricing model encourages music lovers to discover and buy new music. If a song is free, it hasn’t been discovered by a wider audience. If a song is 98 cents, it’s already a must-hear hit. Recommend the great new songs you find to your friends and earn credit for buying even more great music!

The idea seems to be based on the new methods of news ranking (whats hot) and could be a big hit with music fans (especially those who like obscure music that will never be popular…). The downloads have no DRM on them and can be played/downloaded/shared to anything that can play mp3s which is a plus and it seems to be a cross platform service as well, another plus.

For more information or to see if they have your favorite artists (don’t expect anything too main stream at the moment…) visit Amie Street Music.

Linuxtracker.org is pleased to announce the availability of Bluewhite64 11.0-LiveCD-r1 on the linuxtracker bittorrent network. For faster downloads, more accurate statistics and to see all of the available torrents, please visit http://linuxtracker.org. A 64-bit Slackware-based live CD

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