As an IT consultant I can always lament the fact that people just don’t seem to care enough about their computers.

On the other hand, the Internet can be a treacherous place where one can be baited into anything. See the below screenshot for a view of a website where you can download a particular piece of software.

See all of the Download buttons (I count 3). Note that none of those is the correct one!

Would I expect a normal person using a computer to understand which one to click? I don’t think so. To me it’s obvious, but I’m not your average user.

Recently I have been spending some time with a yoga instructor, and I have to say that from the outside, remaining mindful of the body becomes an all-encompassing process that yields great rewards in spirit and energy.

Imagine if people treated their computers as their holy temple, their valuable body.

I’m still entranced by the idea that many users treat their machines so poorly, as though they are unimportant adornments to their modern life, but Zeus help me if that same computer breaks! The user bemoans and grieves the loss of their digital companion as if they could not possibly drudge on in this waking life without email and Facebook. And of course by extension I am called up and asked to work miracles, where even real miracles cannot fix the damage. Here at AvianBLUE we are only human.

Don’t know what you have till you’ve lost it, right?

So here’s to the tender care and feeding of your trusted computer:

1. Tap thee lightly on the keypad, for these letters facilitate your once-hourly Facebook updates: “I’m having soo much fun sipping a latté at Starbucks!”
2. Gently remove thy dust bunnies from between the finger-keys and fan-apparati using the purposeful breeze of a canned windstorm with attached straw, available at your local supplier of office doodads.
3. Lay heed to the words and wisdom of your IT guru, update and upgrade often, as this is the spiritual path to computer enlightenment.
4. Carry one’s computer companion with the loftiness of a cloud, and set lovingly upon the clean and composed workspace.
5. Tread only the clean areas of the Internet, and beware the pitfalls as described above.

It’s been a few months since I learned about rsnapshot, a neat little utility that uses hard linking to create multiple point-in-time snapshots of your data. It combines the neat features of rsync into a package that does more than just mirror data.

If you’ve ever had clients who suffer from “data decay”, you’d know that just having the most recent version of a file can be useless. An Excel spreadsheet could have been corrupted weeks ago, and people will continue to write changes to it–despite warning messages–until it really fails hard, which is always too late.

Conceptually I was having a hard time understanding the topology of rsnapshot server and the clients it’s supposed to back up. Such questions were:

1. Are you supposed to have rsnapshot on every client machine, connecting to the server in a push fashion?
2. Is /etc/rsnapshot.conf supposed to exist on every machine you are backing up?
3. Or does the server login to all client machines and initiate a pull backup?
4. Can I store the backup repo on a network share?
5. Does it use only rsync?

As per #4, I was quite foolishly modifying the snapshot_root directive in /etc/rsnapshot.conf to point to a network location (CIFS share), even though the comments in that file clearly state that it’s supposed to be a local root. I guess this should have been a no-brainer, but in my skimming of the documentation it wasn’t clear why I couldn’t set the snapshot_root to be a network location!

Only when I tried to use rsnapshot in conjunction with a TeraStation Live did I learn the truth! Behold, rsnapshot sits on the server, manages it’s own backup root, and communicates with clients using only rsync, or rsync over SSH (answer to question #5. This makes sense because the rsnapshot server must scan its local repositories for changes, and _it_ does folder rotation. The server can’t know what’s changed on the client unless it stores state information over there, and if that client dies, then you would lose that data!

For example:
daily.0/
daily.1/
daily.2/
daily.3/
daily.4/

Say you set retention to 5 days. This means that the next daily will cause a rearrangement. daily.2/ becomes daily.1/ and daily.1/ becomes daily.0/, and daily.0/ disappears.

I’ll be posting a second note on how to initiate a VSS snapshot of a Windows drive over SSH in preparation for a pull backup from a Windows client to a Linux server. For reference I’m looking at TimeDicer, a GPL tool for doing rdiff-backup of a running Windows system.

One of my biggest gripes with Windows 7 is how long it takes to manage the install and uninstall of software packages.

I can be assured that when receiving a new Lenovo notebook for a client for example, I will spend 30 “active minutes” and 30 “waiting minutes” simply removing software I don’t need–and babysitting the Windows installer. That’s an hour of time when my average site visit is 4 hours in length, what a waste!

This is a job that should take 30 seconds of active time and maybe 5 minutes of waiting.

So, the Windows installer framework in Windows Vista and later:

1. Has no concurrency (seems MS has still not figured out how to handle shared libraries and dependencies)
2. Is doggedly slow
3. Assumes I am too dumb and my time is worth nothing

Constrast to Windows XP

In Windows XP, application vendors often had uninstall links in their Programs folder on the Start Menu, allowing you to simulate some kind of concurrency.
In Windows 7 the trend seems to be that applications remove the uninstall links from their Start Menu folders, you must use “Programs and Features” in Control Panel.

Using uninstall links allowed you to work around the problem of uninstalling multiple programs at the same time.

The New Framework

The Microsoft Install framework is “too smart” and will not let you modify two software packages that both use Windows Installer, and this is just a real bummer.

Not to mention that Windows Installer is just damn slow, and insists on “Collecting the required information for like 5 minutes while there is no sign of the dialogs actually doing anything, and no disk or CPU activity. “Please wait while the current package is being configured.” It seems like the developers at MS wrote this as part of their installer code:

if package.is_installing():
package.wait(5);

in an endless loop.

The Proper Solution

Contrast this with most Linux package management systems’ process for removing firefox, gimp, libreoffice in one fell swoop:

Arch Linux
pacman -R firefox gimp libreoffice

Debian
apt-get remove firefox gimp libreoffice

Ubuntu
sudo apt-get remove firefox gimp libreofficeCentOS
yum remove firefox gimp libreoffice

Do What Mac OS X does

Or we can even use Mac OS X and drag the applications from the Applications folder to the trash bin and get it over with. Thanks, Apple!

More time = more money

But after all this, the realization hits me: Microsoft is helping me to make money by bumping up my billable hours. To my clients: honestly, it’s not me being slow, it’s MS!

There is one way to address this, by writing a script to do the in

wmic product where name="" call uninstall /interactive:off

from softwaretalk.info.

But there are flaws like half-removed programs, and there is no concurrency, you still have to uninstall one-at-a-time.

Sigh someday MS will get a clue.

While doing some improvements on the McGill Outdoors Club house up in Prevost, QC, we stopped at a local hardware store called “Matério“. They’re a chain in Quebec.

While standing in the checkout line, I became curious (as usual) about how their Point of Sale (POS) system worked. I snuck a peak at the touchscreens…

I could see that they were doing the entire sale in an IE window, with an internal 192.168.x.x URL. Every item that was scanned populated the webpage after a brief auto refresh.

Custom or Open Source?

The interface was all French, leading me to believe that this was a custom job written for them. But what a great idea! I would think that all POS systems should be web-based. This way your terminal manufacturer and OS are moot, as long as a web browser is available, you can process sales

UI Design

Couldn’t help but notice that on the payment page (final page of a sale), there were about 5 fields stacked on each other, each field labeled for a method of payment (Interac, Credit, Cheque, Cash), but to get to the “Cash” field at the bottom, the cashier had to use the scroll bar on the right and drag to reveal the lower fields.

As a wannabe UI designer I surmised a couple of things:

1. Page should fit on screen without scrolling, this is a design flaw
2. IE should be running full screen without the address bar to save space–I shouldn’t be seeing the URL at the top, it’s a waste of space.

Some other possible snafus

Of course, a web-based PoS could have a few hurdles to get over.

1. If there is a mag-stripe reader, how do you give focus to the correct field in the webpage without having the user tap to put the cursor there first? Is there a backchannel you can use to interface with the stripe reader rather than emulating an input device?
2. Printer needs to be networked to the main server (serial-over-IP), as we can’t guarantee that every terminal/PC using the PoS can reliably print to a local receipt printer.

I guess I’m a bit spoiled. Linux never leaves me hanging when I need to access a filesystem. Anything I throw at it–NTFS, FAT32, HFS+, ext2, ext3, XFS, ZFS.

• Outgoing from Mac

• HFS+

• Outgoing from Windows

• NTFS

• Outgoing from Linux

• NTFS, ext2, ext3, xfs, HFS+ (journal disabled)

I have a dream. One where I can backup a server with minimal fuss, with desirable and delicious features like backing up locked files, storing multiple points in time, only backing up changed sectors, and having a command line tool to control jobs.

Believe it or not, there are tons of vendors out there selling backup software that recopies entire files when only a few bytes have changed. So with VM images, this could mean tens of GBs of unnecessary data copies every time you do a backup. Kind of a bummer.

Anyone who’s tried to run ntbackup.exe in Server 2008 has discovered the buried, curious, new tool called Windows Server Backup. Maybe this is what we were looking for all along? Maybe not.

Great stuff that MS removed since ntbackup.exe:

• Backup to tape – no longer supported, you need a 3rd party backup program to do this
• Backup to network (CIFS) share – no longer offered, see note below

A work around for the network share feature is to use the wbadmin.exe tool to manually execute backups to network destinations with the huge limitation that it will completely overwrite the previous backup that was stored there. So for 1TB of data, you are copying 1TB each day!

Other “features”

• If you select a complete system backup (suitable for bare-metal restore), then all drives on my server are selected because Windows thinks that there are system files on my E:\ drive. But Server Backup won’t tell you what/where they are!

Luckily, there are a few bits of candy that Microsoft is going to tease you with:

• VHD format backups
• VSS support for getting data in a consistent state (Hyper-V and SQL Server)
• It’s free with Windows Server

I’m a nerd, and I get nerd-fanciful about the fact that VHD is the new backup format. I could conceivably use qemu-img to convert the VHD files to a raw disk image suitable to dd to a new server from a Linux live CD. Seeing as it’s used in Hyper-V as well, I can see a lot of 3rd party developers offering tools to recover data from VHDs in the event of corruption.

Having said all of this, the About dialogue shows Windows Server Backup @ v1.0, so maybe all this will be fixed the next time around. How about you? Have you found the perfect backup tool that has the features mentioned at the top of the article?