Linux

I would like to actually have something like Secure Boot, but in a way that I can trust it. I boot most of my machines with a kernel and an initrd which contains some cryptsetup/luks stuff in order to open my encrypted containers via password. So I need to trust that noone tampers with the initrd in the meantime. (Using passwdfiles instead of manually entering them doesnt improve this situation very much.)

But with SecureBoot the way it is realised, I need to trust whoever certified the bootloader. And since both stuxnet and flame hat official certs and Verisign got broken into and my general paranoia assures me that at least the NSA or the Aluminium Bavariati have general "All Area" tickets, this whole system is broken by design and possibly the main idea is what IG says.

But like dothebart says, almost no copyright mechanism has ever protected a product from pirates. Especially not mainstream software and when it comes to gaming platforms. I predict that the SecureBoot2 will require your machine to be connected to an onlineserver in order to check if your account is allowed to use it, this time providing real protection!

WRT to the Hollywood issue: Do not even pirate their shyte, do not even ignore it and do not finish reading this sentence! Watch asian movies, they are the opposite of Hollywood movies: The actors all look alike but the plots are pretty unique.... Even the greeks make interesting movies these days (Dogtooth for example.) 

So I have this customer with one fileserver and I have rsnapshot installed as a backup system, but I am totally unhappy with it.

We currently have incremental backups each day and keep a weekly snapshot. The users there tend to delete or overwrite files quite often, so in the future I want to use something different. They are architects, so mostly some very recent files change often, but when the building is finished, files dont really change but are kept for reference, etc.

I want to keep the incremental daily backups and probably four weekly backups, also about 6 monthly incremental backups on the harddisks. But I also want to keep a full backup of the last four weeks on tape seperately or maybe one tape for each whole month. I really haven't set up something like this before.

This is what the disk usage is currently, data isn't really growing much and could be reduced if long time archive tapes or similar would be established.

/dev/mapper/vg_data 493G 269G 199G 58% /srv
/dev/mapper/vg_backup 739G 388G 314G 56% /mnt/backup

rsnapshot doesn't give me the granularity I need, Amanda does not seem to do on-disk backups the way I need them: Users should be able to retrieve files from the on-disk backup via a comfortable samba read-only share.

So, do you have any recommendations? Should I combine some backup tools? Like something for the on-disk backups and amanda for the tape stuff?

Thanks for reading so far

I was using the symantec backup solution for some of my consulting clients for a while....but that may be overkill for a single server.

If you are using rsnapshot already, you might give duplicity a look:

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

It has had some growing pains over the last few years, but has grown to be a decent solution for me.  The best part I have found using duplicity is the ability to change out the back end by simply rsyncing the store to another back end and changing the backup url scheme.

The part I did not like is figuring out how to script it.  There are convenience scripts out there that wrapper duplicity, but I don't trust them yet.  If you want I could share what I have so far and what I have written for a wrapper for duplicity.  It is quite flexible for doing backups where you have different backups to run (especially if you need to backup parts of filesystems on a different schedule as you can split a backup in to parts).

Agreed that doing a snapshot with LVM or something is faster / more complete, but you might find you need to set aside a bit more in CPU and or filesystem (if it changes quickly during the backup) than you might think.  I have done LVM snapshots for a while, but found you can get in to cases of Uninterruptible Sleep (D) State for failed copy processes and the like.  I would love to hear what you come up with though if you are willing to share IG.

How to do it: http://www.eff.org 

How not to do it: http://www.fsf.org

The Electronic Frontier Foundation fights for individual liberties and freedom in the digital world.  They are good at what they do, effective, and successful.

The Free Software Foundation, on the other hand, is a failure.  They were useful back when they used to develop free software.  Now they don't do much of that anymore; it's just Richard Stallman and his sycophants pretending to do the same thing the EFF does, but really all they do is whine a lot, give things different names that confuse everyone, and look like idiots.

Dear FSF: please do everyone a favor and shut your organization down.  Advocates for digital liberty should focus their energy on supporting the EFF; those people know how to do it and be effective at it.

And for the last f**king time, it's called "Linux," not "GNU/Linux."  Some of my code is included in a typical Linux distribution, but you don't see me whining like a spoiled baby when people fail to call the operating system "IGnatius T Foobar / Linux" ... yet Stallman does things like that on an hourly basis.

Seriously FSF, you're a bunch of spoiled whiny babies and you are doing the open source community far more harm than good.  Go away.

I use rsync for stuff I don't need history on and rdiff-backup on stuff I do.

A lot of people seem to like BackupPC.  It is based on rsync but has its own perl front end that does something similiar to rsnapshot (I think) and also does dedup.  It also offers a web-based interface for your users so they can service themselves and retrieve any backup files they want.

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TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana/

I strongly disagree with your rant.

The EFF and the FSF serve completely different missions although sometimes, I guess, their missions might have some overlap.

Lots of people complain about the FSF and the antics of RMS.  I'm not one of those people.  RMS needs to stay the uncompromising jerk he has always been because that is his role.  He is fairly unique in that role.  If it wasn't for him and his purity, we'd all probably be running a lot more proprietary software on top of our free systems... because there would be less free software.  While the FSF doesn't pay people to develop software anymore (to the best of my knowledge, but I'm fairly ignorant on the topic), they do act as a clearing house for lots of free software projects and as far as I know, they have new projects join them all the time.

I have also personally interacted with a number of people (over the years and recently too) that have gotten into free software and Linux because of RMS... as a result of personally seeing him speak.  Yeah, Richard does pretty much say the same things over and over and over... and doesn't have a lot of new material... but there are still a large percentage of people who are completely unfamiliar with his speal... and since he speaks so much, especially overseas, he does still bring a lot of new people into "the movement" even if his message hasn't changed much in the last two decades.  I imagine he will continue to do so.  The EFF, not so much.  See, they have different missions and both the EFF and FSF are good resources.

So, what was it about the FSF that angered you?  I would assume it was something specific and not just the general concept.

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TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

Wow, you're mad that Stallman came up with an alternative name for Secure Boot.  Get over it.  He always comes up with alternative names for things and he always will.  He has a right to do so just as much as everyone else does.  Remember, modern communications is all about "framing" just ask David Frum.  If memory serves he renamed the "estate tax" the "death tax".  Another Stallman framing thing was DRM.  Digital Restrictions Management vs. Digital Rights Management.  I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.  Yes I have seen a number of sqeaky wheels get upset about some of the FSF's PR compaigns saying they were stupid and/or unaffective... but it isn't like they spend 1/100,000 as much as Apple or Microsoft does on one of their product campaigns.  That is to say that given the cost, they are fairly effective... just not as effective as fighting fire with fire.

Regarding the political labeling of RMS and ERS and saying that one has won and one has not or whatever... sorry, but I'm not following you.  Free Software is a winner.  Open Source is a winner.  To me neither term has won out over the other... and they are often clumped together as FOSS or FLOSS.  Both seem to still be legitimate terms that have a decernable meaning... and are somewhat incomplete by themselves.  Free Software is just as important now as it ever was.  In fact with so much stuff going "into the cloud" and the big companies using FLOSS to construct proprietary services, that war we thought we had won has clearly taken an unexpected turn.

I'd like to expand this discussion into hardware too.  We need a free hardware foundation.  Maybe there is one and I'm just not familiar with it... or maybe the FSF has a branch on hardware as well.  Someone please inform me. Here are two presentations that I think are very well worth viewing that show why we need some organization looking out for us on the hardware front.  Maybe the EFF is?

Bruce Perens' Linux.conf.au 2012 Keynote: http://www.montanalinux.org/video-lca2012-keynote-bruce-perens.html

Cory Doctorow: The coming war on general computation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc

My guess is that you are already familiar with them.  The whole Restricted Boot... cough... I mean the UEFI Secure Boot issue plays into the "closed hardware of the future" narative setup by those two videos.

So far as who seems to be more active in the community these days... RMS is still going like the Energizer Bunny although he has had some recent health issues.  I haven't really heard much from ESR in a few years.  The last thing I recall hearing from ESR was when he lambasted Fedora for not abandoning their principles and giving people all of the patent encumbered codecs that they want.  Perhaps I'm paraphrasing in my own unique way.  My guess is that ESR has continued to be active but that I've somehow missed it.

So far as calling it I.T.F Linux... I call my distro either "Fedora Linux" or "MontanaLinux"... but until everyone switches over to LLVM/clang and all BSD licensed tools, RMS does have a reasonable arguement.  I myself do not call it GNU slash Linux and yes I realize that a Linux distro comes from thousands of places... but RMS was on a mission to build a free OS and he had most everything but the kernel... and Linux filled the bill there.  Of course we have the BSD licensed systems as well but I don't see so many people clamoring to them.  They definitely have their following and use cases so please no one take offense.  I prefer the GPL over BSD/MIT.

While I certainly love to talk politics, I really don't like to ues political views as analogies for the software/tech industry.  They just don't map very well... and when I try to think in those terms... my head hurts.

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TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana

Greetings,

I just ran across a computer brand named Telikin that is designed for novice computer users.  They currently offer two all-in-one systems with touch screens, keyboard and mouse.  They run Linux... a fork of Tiny Core Linux... but the user interface that is on it isn't anything that you'd recognise.  It almost seems like a webpage because there is a menu on the left fifth of the screen and the applications take up the rest of the screen... and the menu always shows.  I wonder if they borrowed any code from existing FLOSS applications or they if they did everything completely from scratch?!?

Anyway, check it out if you have any desire.  It is an interesting concept... although I'd like to see the software available separately.  http://www.telikin.com/

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TYL,
Scott Dowdle - Belgrade, Montana