[PLUG] Network storage

William A Morita wamorita at hevanet.com
Tue Jan 16 20:09:47 UTC 2007


Jason,

Here is another possibility:
Convert the Win2K FS to FAT32 (vfat) and load Linux on it as a dual boot.
When you power up your Win2K system booted to Linux you can fsync directly
into the Win2K partition.

- Bill Morita 
wamorita at hevanet.com 


-----Original Message-----
From: plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org
[mailto:plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org] On Behalf Of John Jason Jordan
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 11:43 AM
To: plug at lists.pdxlinux.org
Subject: Re: [PLUG] Network storage

On Mon, 15 Jan 2007 23:15:42 -0800
m0gely <m0gely at telestream.com> dijo:

> I've been mulling over the best way to do something like this as well. 
> One of the problems I am trying to overcome is power consumption. 
> Running a fill fledged tower as Larry mentioned isn't an option for me. 
>   I look at all the computers running around me all the time at my 
> home and my electrical bill and it's just not right. ;)

That is something I am considering also. That's why I've decided to turn off
the Windows 2000 desktop machine except when I need to use it.
These days that's really only an hour or so once or twice a month.
Leaving it running all the time just for that is nuts. Plus, when I built it
five years ago it needed serious power because of all the stuff in it -- I
had to get a case with a 500 watt power supply. 

I also considered RAID, but that isn't necessary for me. These days I use my
Linux laptop for almost everything, but many days go by where the only
changes are a few added saved e-mails, changes to my Firefox bookmarks and
the like. In other words, I don't even need a regular scheduled backup
system, let alone mirroring. It would make more sense to me just to use an
rsync command on an as-needed basis.

I wish that the USB on this laptop wasn't so flakey. I've fiddled with a
lot, but it still locks up the computer whenever I send a lot of data over
it. I don't know if it's a bug in Dapper amd-64 or a hardware problem. If it
were reliable I'd just move the USB drive off the Windows computer and use
it on the laptop. 

Last night at Advanced Topics someone mentioned that the fact that Nautilus
can read and write to the USB drive on the Windows desktop doesn't mean it
is mounted. Well, I revisited the man pages and wikis and stuff and last
night was actually able to mount it. (It shows up with the mount command
now.) It took awhile, but the following did it:

sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=jcj //Devil4/Linux_Backups /media/smb

And then I tried what I thought was a proper rsync command to rsync the
whole laptop partition to the folder /laptop on the Linux_Backups partition
on the USb drive:

jjj at Devil5:~$ sudo rsync -a --exclude=/proc / /media/smb/laptop

But that got me a lot of failures:

rsync: readdir("/media/smb/System Volume Information"): Permission denied
(13)
rsync: symlink "/media/smb/laptop/cdrom" -> "media/cdrom" failed: Operation
not permitted (1)
rsync: symlink "/media/smb/laptop/initrd.img" ->
"boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-26-amd64-generic" failed: Operation not permitted
(1)
rsync: symlink "/media/smb/laptop/initrd.img.old" ->
"boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-25-amd64-generic" failed: Operation not permitted
(1)
rsync: symlink "/media/smb/laptop/lib64" -> "lib" failed: Operation not
permitted (1) <a dozen more symlink errors deleted for brevity> Stopped
sudo rsync -a --exclude=/proc / /media/smb/laptop

So I stopped the rsync command at this point. Walking over to the Windows
computer I looked at the USB drive in Explorer and, sure enough, it copied
files and folders before I stopped it.

So it's sort of working. If I can get the rsync command to work the way I
want it to, maybe Ill just forget about the NAS drive and boot up the
Windows desktop whenever I want to do a backup to the USB drive.

I notice that almost all the errors were symlinks. I re-read the man page on
rsync, but I'm not sure how to fix this. I also don't know what "System
Volume Information" (line 1 above) is.

While re-reading the rsync man page it also occurred to me that I need to
exclude /media/smb and also another partition on the laptop, hda3, which is
mounted at /media/hda3. I can't figure out if I need to make additional --
exclude statements for these, or if I can concatenate them somehow. The
rsync man page is pretty daunting for a command line dumbass like me. But I
know that once I get it right I can save it to my CheatSheet.txt file. 

My goal is to make the copy on the USB disk basically a mirror of the laptop
partition. Rsync would run pretty fast since it only needs to add/update
what has changed. And that way I will always have a complete copy of my
Dapper installation. I keep remembering when I accidentally deleted /bin. :(

I'm going to google some more on rsync. Meantime, I could use suggestions on
how to fix the above command.
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