A few days ago, I was checking a friend’s system for backing up. It was based on rsync at the Linux side and rsync server on a windows machine he uses for storing information generated by other software. The solution with rsync worked pretty well for him until he started to put several strange characters in filenames which rendered the backup unusable to certain point. After being asked for alternative backup software that was available on several platforms, I’ve ended testing duplicity. ...

Today I’ve decided to give it a try to F15-prealpha (expected to release tomorrow). The upgrade performed in the unsupported way (getting and forcing install for newer fedora-release from a mirror then start issuing several yum upgrades) when reasonably good. Only some minor dependency problems et voilà, system started fine. Problems so far: Firefox 4 has a few approved extensions, I used the “nightly tester tools” to disable version check and enable most of the ones I had with 3.6.x without problems. Don’t like gnome-shell at the moment Desktop icons disappeared… Menu bar is black and found no way to configure it yet Gnome-applets have some dependency problems and can’t install or configure them, furthermore I lost my tray area on one of the computers but works fine on the other. I hope that tomorrow’s release of Alpha will fix some of them in order to warm-up for final launch (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/15/Schedule)… ...

Introduction A standard install media, (let’s talk about a DVD for easier start) has several files/folders at his root, but most important are: isolinux (where the loader lives) images (for extra files for installer to load) Packages for installation (RedHat/ for EL4, Server/Client for EL5) Usually, a distribution has, for its main binaries, more than 2 gigabytes of data, that enables one target to act as a multifunction server/workstation, but that you will not usually load on the same system. Furthermore, since the DVD creation, there have been so many updates/patches that make your installation a ‘outdated’ install that you’ll need to upgrade to have recent patches. ...

MiniDLNA provides an OpenSource DLNA server software that can index and present specific folders on your computer to DLNA clients on your network. Project at sourceforge is distributed as CVS code that you need to checkout and compile for it to work on your computer. I’ve setup a spec file that will allow you to create an rpm that has been tested on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 machine x86 for easing adoption among users. ...

I’ve been using a Xen guest under RHEL 5.2 to hold this Webserver, and because of failures, I choose to keep a copy of the full disk image on another machine. Having to transfer the full disk in the network means stop the server (Xen guest), rsync the image on disk (wait 40 minutes), then start guest again. After doing the initial image transfer, it would be easier to just sync updated files, but… how to loop mount a full disk? ...