Thanks for the tips about backup! Within /one hour/ of starting with the new service, my main home server died yesterday (sudden infant death of a Seagate Barracuda purchased just 25 days earlier). This led to the following Tale of the City (of Cambridge):
It turned out to be a bad calendar date for me to buy a whole new server in the fit of pique that ensued, but off to Microcenter I went to plunk down $1200 on a whole new everything. There have been just too many failures of that particular lemon-y server ever since the Supermicro X7SBL-LN2 socket-775 motherboard darkened my doorstep on 19-Jul-2008. Damn thing eats hardware, and piecemeal updates of drives, power supply, RAM etc have done nothing to stabilize the thing. Reminds me of the jinxed computer room at my last employer: owing to a somewhat-suspect decision by a penny-pinching CFO, we went for a whole winter without proper AC, opening two windows to let in the sooty Cambridge air. One time we had to "shovel out" snow from the room; there was literally a half-inch of snow on several of the rack-mounted systems. As I predicted, the failures happened over the course of 12 months afterward, not right away. I digress. Right now is a bad time to buy new computers, according to a helpful long-haired geek who groused loudly enough to for me to hear about the pitiful state of mainboard inventory at the Microcenter DIY department. We ended up in a 30-minute conversation which convinced me just how overwhelmingly complex the hardware market has become. In a nutshell: what you want now is socket 1155-based processors, not the 775 I got in '08 or 1156 I got in '09 or the 1366 I wound up with last night. My geek friend left empty-handed (except for what he considered a great deal on an Intel chip, the i5 2500K) after the sales guy spent about 20 minutes rummaging in the back for what turned out to be a previously-shoplifted mainboard that still shows up in inventory. After the sales guy finished with him, he started what turned out to be a 1-hour journey through the parts bins. Though it was tedious and time-consuming, at least it convinced me that I wasn't the only one who can't find stuff I want at that store: even an experienced sales guy has the same trouble! If any of y'all remember PCs For Everyone, you'll know exactly why they'd set the place up for counter service like a car-parts place: if you unleash enough customers in the aisles of a retail store, within hours you won't be able to find anything, period. Entropy asserts itself! My trip to the store took a hair over 2 hours, plus 15 minutes each way to get there. Building the actual computer (18GB of RAM, a weird amount and don't ask why, the parts gods weren't smiling, 10TB of disk, a lot of stuff) and loading up my O/S took something like 75 minutes. Maybe eventually I'll have enough hardware at home that I can survive any possible outage for the 48 hours it takes to reprovision by mail order, the way a data center manager has to with corporate infrastructure. Retail is dead, long live retail! Anyway, I'll close with this: once I got my server back online at 11:20pm last night, I immediately restarted the online backup. By 23:45, I had the highest-priority quarter-GB worth of data uploaded to CrashPlan. This morning I did a test restore which worked fine. For $50 a year, it's a perfect match for what I was looking for. And it has a cool feature where users can send each other data as peers, bypassing the central data center. The UI is pretty basic but fine for a basic just-save-my-files-damnit backup, and its default resync interval is 15 minutes (!), not the usual 24 hours. The only flaw with the whole thing is that the Internet still isn't as fast as you'd want. ;-) -rich _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
