Re: [SLUG] Moving hard drives and data around
On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 04:42:12PM +1100, david wrote: Sorry for slightly hijacking the thread.. but my experience of these gadgets has been universally bad (read: didn't work at all). Have they improved in the last year or so? I have one which is a rectangle with connectors on all 4 sides - one for USB, one for SATA, one for IDE 3.5 and the last for IDE 2.5. It works but it's not marvelous. My impression is that heavy data transfers(*) can kill it. (*) Like copying a large filesystem which saturates the USB bus for many minutes. Also doing silly things like hdparm can break it immediately. Nick. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Moving hard drives and data around
On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 04:47:54PM +1100, Jake Anderson wrote: I have one, I wouldn't class it as good but it seems to work. the dock style ones I've heard good things about I have a dock style one with eSATA connectors. The eSATA interface is good because it isn't USB-HDD, and is a lot faster than USB. The dock also provides various SD/SIM/MicroSD sockets but they haven't yet worked for me. However, the dock doesn't put any airflow over the disk and so it heats up way too hot after a few minutes. I pointed a small fan at it; kept it at a nice stable temperature. Nick. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Surveillance camera in car
Having been the target of a road-rage attack recently (driver behind chucked a rock at me) I can see the value of having front and rear cameras recording. They're actually pretty affordable these days (see http://www.etronixmart.com/vosonic-gv6330-vehicle-safeguard-night-vision-car-video-camera-p-516.html?osCsid=a075cabb7bdc23a203f9e79fbc0dcc78 ). However I was thinking of something more durable: * front camera mounted on the driver's sunshade, able to be aimed by hand if desired * rear camera on the parcels shelf, protected from overhead sunshine * single-board computer somewhere, receiving the pix, cropping them and recording them onto a 80GiB disc drive * little screen visible to the driver, usually showing the rear view [handy for parking] * some sort of control switch for e.g. temporarily increasing the normal recording rate from 1 frame/second to perhaps 4 frames/second if the driver desires The TS-7250 looks suitable (http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=TS-7250) but the only cameras I've found have composite video output e.g. Jaycar's QC3491. Can anyone suggest hardware suitable for such a setup, please? Jim Donovan -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Moving hard drives and data around
On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 4:42 PM, david da...@kenpro.com.au wrote: Finally for about $35 you can buy USB adapters for SATA + IDE so you can plug one of your new drives into the target computer and bypass the 1.5T backup drive. Sorry for slightly hijacking the thread.. but my experience of these gadgets has been universally bad (read: didn't work at all). Have they improved in the last year or so? I had one I used at my previous place of employment which we bought from Lindy - and it worked flawlessly - plug into HD, plug in power, plug into USB - bingo, external hard disk. PATA, SATA, even laptop drives - no difference. I used it frequently for quick data recovery jobs (from dead PC's without damage to the disk, for example) and for moving data around. I think the most data I moved using it was somewhere around the 280 gig mark. https://www.lindy.com.au/online/arrshop.exe?anonymous=truecat=f0 It's a bit more than $35 ($60 plus shipping) but I know from experience they work. Comes with power supply for the drive as well as the USB adapter. N.B. I must admit I only ever used it with WindoZe machines, not Linux boxen. The specifications say it's only compatible with 'Doze and Mac machines. but I see no reason why they wouldn't work with Linux machines as well. DaZZa -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?
I noticed the following on the Commonwealth netbank site this morning: NetBank, Mobile Banking and Telephone Banking will be unavailable between 2am and 5am EST on Sunday 4 April 2010 to allow for the changeover from Australian Eastern Daylight Savings time to Australian Eastern Standard time. Please take this timeframe into consideration when completing your banking. For updates during this change, please visit: www.commbank.com.au/update. Please press NEXT to access NetBank. Assuming it wasn't an April Fool joke, perhaps it means their databases use local time and the logic won't permit transactions to be entered out of order such as might appear to be if one happened just before the changeover time and another less than an hour later. How quaint! I remember hearing once that Commonwealth Bank servers were always rebooted on Sundays so they'd be less likely to go down during the week. Jim Donovan -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Moving hard drives and data around
Hey y'all http://systemimager.org Systemimager works well to image a hard disk and to move the image to an another hard disk. I believe it handles LVM well and can handle RAID too. My backup server runs debian + systemimager. It is reliable so I sleep well. Check it out. It is a killer app! David On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 12:00 +1100, slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote: Send slug mailing list submissions to slug@slug.org.au To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to slug-requ...@slug.org.au You can reach the person managing the list at slug-ow...@slug.org.au When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of slug digest... Today's Topics: 1. Moving hard drives and data around (Nigel Allen) 2. Re: Moving hard drives and data around (Nick Andrew) 3. Re: Moving hard drives and data around (Jake Anderson) 4. Re: Moving hard drives and data around (david) 5. Re: Moving hard drives and data around (Jake Anderson) 6. Re: Moving hard drives and data around (Nick Andrew) 7. Re: Moving hard drives and data around (Nick Andrew) 8. Surveillance camera in car (Jim Donovan) 9. Re: Moving hard drives and data around (DaZZa) email message attachment Forwarded Message From: Nigel Allen d...@edrs.com.au To: slug@slug.org.au Subject: [SLUG] Moving hard drives and data around Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:18:39 +1100 Hi All Apologies for the repost - I asked this a while ago but there is now an additional wrinkle^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hopportunity. I have to do a hard-drive shuffle in the coming weeks. The machine is a HP DL145 G3 which only has interfaces for 2 x hdd's. The current disks are 2 x 80GB set up as /boot on /dev/sda1 and (sda2 plus sdb1) are pooled together to make up /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00. They are running at 97% full. I'm about to replace the 2 x 80GB drives with 2 x 1TB drives which should keep the customer going for a while. Given that I can't attach all 4 hdds to the system at the same time, I have plugged in a WD USB drive (1.5TB) so that we have a transfer mechanism (as well as a second backup online in addition to the tape backup). I would like to have the 2 new disks in a RAID-1 array to give them a little redundancy. What is the easiest way to get from where I am (2 x 80GB as /boot and a log vol) to where I want to be (a pair of mirrored drives). My first thought was simpy to backup everything to the USB connected drive, rip out the 2 x 80GB and replace them with the 2 x 1TB drives. Set up the disks as a RAID 1 array. Do a partial install of the OS and then simply copy everything back where it was. I'm sure there is a better way than this sledgehammer approach, probably involving LVM but given my unfamiliarity with LVM I thought I should ask first. TIA Nigel. email message attachment Forwarded Message From: Nick Andrew n...@nick-andrew.net To: Nigel Allen d...@edrs.com.au Cc: slug@slug.org.au Subject: Re: [SLUG] Moving hard drives and data around Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:50:06 +1100 On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 02:18:39PM +1100, Nigel Allen wrote: The machine is a HP DL145 G3 which only has interfaces for 2 x hdd's. The current disks are 2 x 80GB set up as /boot on /dev/sda1 and (sda2 plus sdb1) are pooled together to make up /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00. They are running at 97% full. Only 160 gigs, hmmm. I'm about to replace the 2 x 80GB drives with 2 x 1TB drives which should keep the customer going for a while. Given that I can't attach all 4 hdds to the system at the same time, I have plugged in a WD USB drive (1.5TB) so that we have a transfer mechanism (as well as a second backup online in addition to the tape backup). I would like to have the 2 new disks in a RAID-1 array to give them a little redundancy. Grub2 is good for that (1.97+whatever). What is the easiest way to get from where I am (2 x 80GB as /boot and a log vol) to where I want to be (a pair of mirrored drives). My first thought was simpy to backup everything to the USB connected drive, rip out the 2 x 80GB and replace them with the 2 x 1TB drives. Set up the disks as a RAID 1 array. Do a partial install of the OS and then simply copy everything back where it was. I'm sure there is a better way than this sledgehammer approach, probably involving LVM but given my unfamiliarity with LVM I thought I should ask first. You can use pvmove to move the physical extents on LogVol00 from one physical drive to another, but (1) it takes a long time and (2) you have no redundancy while you are doing it. I've done it and sometimes
Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?
Jim Donovan wrote: I noticed the following on the Commonwealth netbank site this morning: NetBank, Mobile Banking and Telephone Banking will be unavailable between 2am and 5am EST on Sunday 4 April 2010 to allow for the changeover from Australian Eastern Daylight Savings time to Australian Eastern Standard time. Please take this timeframe into consideration when completing your banking. For updates during this change, please visit: www.commbank.com.au/update. Please press NEXT to access NetBank. Similar for Westpac: Online Banking will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance from 02:50 to 04:15 AEST on Sunday 4 April 2010. Another one not using Linux. cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Hofstadter's Law. It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?
Jim Donovan wrote: I noticed the following on the Commonwealth netbank site this morning: NetBank, Mobile Banking and Telephone Banking will be unavailable between 2am and 5am EST on Sunday 4 April 2010 to allow for the changeover from Australian Eastern Daylight Savings time to Australian Eastern Standard time. Please take this timeframe into consideration when completing your banking. For updates during this change, please visit: www.commbank.com.au/update. Please press NEXT to access NetBank. Assuming it wasn't an April Fool joke, perhaps it means their databases use local time and the logic won't permit transactions to be entered out of order such as might appear to be if one happened just before the changeover time and another less than an hour later. How quaint! I remember hearing once that Commonwealth Bank servers were always rebooted on Sundays so they'd be less likely to go down during the week. Jim Donovan Odds are its more to do with their internal applications which are probably written on cobalt running on CP/M machines or something equally modern. Your probably lucky they even know time zones exist ;-. You should have seen the massive DNS issues they had around xmas, I believe they lost a whole data centre and ISP's around the place weren't getting new DNS entries or something along those lines so netbank was down. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?
Jake Anderson wrote: Odds are its more to do with their internal applications which are probably written on cobalt running on CP/M machines or something equally modern. It'll more likely be an old IBM system Z (aka z series aka s390) mainframe. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?
David Gillies wrote: Jake Anderson wrote: Odds are its more to do with their internal applications which are probably written on cobalt running on CP/M machines or something equally modern. It'll more likely be an old IBM system Z (aka z series aka s390) mainframe. yeah, something along those lines, room sized at least ;- -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Why so snooty? Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?
quote who=Rick Welykochy Similar for Westpac: Online Banking will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance from 02:50 to 04:15 AEST on Sunday 4 April 2010. Another one not using Linux. Not sure what Linux has to do with this -- there's far more going on (with dates and times especially) in a complex stack of software than just the OS. Consider the amount of legacy software and multi-system integration involved in a bank's computing environment. Sorry dudes, but this just sounds like Open Source snootiness from the small end of town. Seriously, just look at half the MySQL-based Open Source applications around you... Example: WordPress only gained automagically updating named timezones (rather than manual offsets) in 2.7 or 2.8. Fat load of good Linux [1] did in that case. - Jeff [1] It's not like you're talking about the Linux kernel here, either. -- The Great Australian Internet Blackout http://www.internetblackout.com.au/ I wonder how many bugs have gone unfixed due to misspellings of FIXME. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?
David Gillies wrote: Jake Anderson wrote: Odds are its more to do with their internal applications which are probably written on cobalt running on CP/M machines or something equally modern. It'll more likely be an old IBM system Z (aka z series aka s390) mainframe. Dated Tue 25 Jun 2002 Total Eclipse of the Sun: The Commonwealth Bank uses Microsoft and Intel architecture. ... “In the past, many companies would not have even considered a Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/australia/resources/totaleclipse_cba.pdf Marghanita -- Marghanita da Cruz http://ramin.com.au Tel: 0414-869202 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?
Jake Anderson ya...@vapourforge.com writes: Jim Donovan wrote: I noticed the following on the Commonwealth netbank site this morning: NetBank, Mobile Banking and Telephone Banking will be unavailable between 2am and 5am EST on Sunday 4 April 2010 to allow for the changeover from Australian Eastern Daylight Savings time to Australian Eastern Standard time. Please take this timeframe into consideration when completing your banking. For updates during this change, please visit: www.commbank.com.au/update. Please press NEXT to access NetBank. Assuming it wasn't an April Fool joke, perhaps it means their databases use local time and the logic won't permit transactions to be entered out of order such as might appear to be if one happened just before the changeover time and another less than an hour later. How quaint! I remember hearing once that Commonwealth Bank servers were always rebooted on Sundays so they'd be less likely to go down during the week. Odds are its more to do with their internal applications which are probably written on cobalt running on CP/M machines or something equally modern. Your probably lucky they even know time zones exist ;-. My money would be on the very boring option, paranoia: If you shut down as many of these systems as possible during the change over, then those systems *can't* go wrong — because they are doing nothing. If you leave them running then, hey, maybe something breaks. So, if you want to look at the cost/benefit analysis the cost of a few hours outage overnight is pretty low, especially if you can schedule it well in advance, and even more so if you can do some other maintenance work at the same time. Meanwhile, no risk of things going wrong during the change-over, which is always a huge PR fiasco even if nothing really bad happens. Daniel If it was my call, I would probably do the same thing. Way too many developers get simple things like this day has no 2:30AM or this day has two 2:00AMs wrong. -- ✣ Daniel Pittman✉ dan...@rimspace.net☎ +61 401 155 707 ♽ made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
RE: Why so snooty? Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?
Actually there are reasons why Microsoft systems cannot handle the changeover as well as Linux based systems. The biggest is that the Windows API cannot perform the conversion between local time and UTC as at some other point in time. So, for example, if, come Monday, you look at the date of this email from a Windows system, the email will appear to have been sent 1 hour earlier than it appears to have been sent today. This is because the Windows system will convert the UTC date (or equivalent) stored in the email to AEST. It will not recognise that in fact AEDT applied at the time of the message. This can be an annoying thing to have to explain to a judge, especially when you have an email chain in evidence, and it appears on first glance to be out of order. Linux systems do not suffer from that problem. Moreover, the data format of the time zone information is well published so that applications can be written to deal with other complications that can arise. With Windows the information is super secret. Also, Windows only records time zone changeover information by means of a single rule - it does not record historical changes by year as the TZInfo database used on Linux does. That is why for the year 2000 in Sydney (with the 1-of early change to AEDT for the Olympics) Windows users had to install a new time zone, change their system to that time zone, then change it back for the following year. Another unwanted side effect is that at changeover time, the modification date of every file on the system, when converted to local time, appears to change by an hour. Again Linux will apply the offset applicable at the relevant time, rather than the current offset. This deficiency in Windows is truly painful when writing software that attempts to do things on a timed schedule. There are some problems that simply cannot be worked around. Even installing and using the TZInfo database will not help, since the result will vary from what Windows would have done. Perhaps you could create your own database of Windows time zone changes, and hope and pray that the user updated the time zones and the patches at all the right times, but you would most likely be swapping one error for another. Having had way too much experience writing software for Windows that had to deal with time zones, and also had rather more positive experience writing software for Linux that had to deal with time zones, I can vouch for the fact that Linux does it many, many times better than Windows. If you are using Windows for servers where time ordering is relatively critical, you may well have no real option other than to shut the servers down during the transition. Regards, Troy Rollo Solicitor Parry Carroll Commercial Lawyers Direct: (02) 8257 3177 Fax: (02) 9221 1375 Switch: (02) 9221 3899 E-mail: t...@parrycarroll.com.au Web: www.parrycarroll.com.au http://www.parrycarroll.com.au Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation This message and any attachments are confidential to Parry Carroll. If you have received it my mistake, please let us know by reply and then delete it from your system. You must not copy the message, alter it or disclose its contents to anyone. Thank you. -Original Message- From: slug-boun...@slug.org.au [mailto:slug-boun...@slug.org.au] On Behalf Of Jeff Waugh Sent: Thursday, 1 April 2010 3:27 PM To: slug@slug.org.au Subject: Why so snooty? Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers? quote who=Rick Welykochy Similar for Westpac: Online Banking will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance from 02:50 to 04:15 AEST on Sunday 4 April 2010. Another one not using Linux. Not sure what Linux has to do with this -- there's far more going on (with dates and times especially) in a complex stack of software than just the OS. Consider the amount of legacy software and multi-system integration involved in a bank's computing environment. Sorry dudes, but this just sounds like Open Source snootiness from the small end of town. Seriously, just look at half the MySQL-based Open Source applications around you... Example: WordPress only gained automagically updating named timezones (rather than manual offsets) in 2.7 or 2.8. Fat load of good Linux [1] did in that case. - Jeff [1] It's not like you're talking about the Linux kernel here, either. -- The Great Australian Internet Blackout http://www.internetblackout.com.au/ I wonder how many bugs have gone unfixed due to misspellings of FIXME. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?
On Thu, Apr 01, 2010 at 03:39:00PM +1100, Daniel Pittman wrote: If it was my call, I would probably do the same thing. Way too many developers get simple things like this day has no 2:30AM or this day has two 2:00AMs wrong. That's why Daylight Savings is fundamentally evil. Too much time data is stored in non-canonical formats. Nick. -- PGP Key ID = 0x418487E7 http://www.nick-andrew.net/ PGP Key fingerprint = B3ED 6894 8E49 1770 C24A 67E3 6266 6EB9 4184 87E7 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Time Pedantry (was Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?)
Nick Andrew n...@nick-andrew.net writes: On Thu, Apr 01, 2010 at 03:39:00PM +1100, Daniel Pittman wrote: If it was my call, I would probably do the same thing. Way too many developers get simple things like this day has no 2:30AM or this day has two 2:00AMs wrong. That's why Daylight Savings is fundamentally evil. Too much time data is stored in non-canonical formats. ...but the real question is if we love or hate the GMT/UTC difference, and 23:59:61? Daniel Also, do we hate the earthquake that changed the length of the day for messing with our time-keeping? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100302084522.htm (And, finally, for anyone who really wants to despair at the whole thing, I give you The Long, Painful History of Time, which is the best write-up I know of about the engineering difficulties of the topic: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html ) -- ✣ Daniel Pittman✉ dan...@rimspace.net☎ +61 401 155 707 ♽ made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Why so snooty? Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?
On Thu, Apr 01, 2010 at 03:27:23PM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: Not sure what Linux has to do with this -- there's far more going on (with dates and times especially) in a complex stack of software than just the OS. Consider the amount of legacy software and multi-system integration involved in a bank's computing environment. I see it more like software superstition. Bad things might happen - we don't know, we won't (or can't) test it, and we won't (or can't) fix it. Sorry dudes, but this just sounds like Open Source snootiness from the small end of town. I want my bank to run on logic, not voodoo. Nick. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
