FreeBSD: Monitor Your Disks’ Health with Smartmontools
Posted by: David Andrzejewski in Computing on March 15th, 2009
Whether you’re using FreeBSD for your workstation, a simple home server, or in a complex IT environment where reliability is critical, losing the data on your hard disk(s) is probably the worst type of failure you can have. I’ve already gone over a backup strategy for FreeBSD, but it’s best to try to prevent data loss before it happens.
As it turns out, pretty much all modern hard disks have built-in SMART technology (SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). It can alert you before many types of problems will occur, and hopefully provide you with enough time to get your data off the drive safely, before catastrophic failure occurs.
It’s pretty easy to take advantage of this technology on FreeBSD with a package called Smartmontools.
Control Your TiVo From Your BlackBerry Bold with Wonderful Remote
Posted by: David Andrzejewski in Entertainment, Mobile Phones on March 1st, 2009
When Wonderful Remote first starts, you’re asked to enter your registration information (or leave it blank for the 48-hour trial), and then you’ll enter your TiVo’s IP address on your network.
You’re then presented with the main screen, which provides a reference on the available functions.
I went through and tried all of the options. When using the trackball to navigate, it’s extremely responsive – the TiVo actually responds to my BlackBerry more quickly than it does to my Logitech Harmony remote.
All of the keys work as advertised, and you have access to all of the functions you’d have on your standard TiVo Remote.
One limitation of the TiVo’s network remote interface is that it doesn’t accept letter keys for search boxes. Instead, Wonderful Remote will send up, down, left, and right commands to navigate to each letter, and then press “select” on it – and it does this incredibly fast.
My opinion? It’s a well-written application. Its only limitation is that my BlackBerry Bold is not a touchscreen device.
While it won’t be replacing my Logitech Harmony remote any time soon, it makes entering text in the various search boxes so fast, it makes it well worth the $2.99.
FreeBSD Backup Using JungleDisk and Dump
Posted by: David Andrzejewski in Computing, Security on March 1st, 2009
I previously discussed configuring JungleDisk on FreeBSD. It’s not quite the easiest to install since FreeBSD isn’t officially supported. To take that a step further, I’m now going to show what I do to back up my FreeBSD box at home.
There are a couple of steps to this process. First, we must perform the backup itself. I’m using dump(8) for this purpose – this program is built right into FreeBSD – it’s purpose in the original UNIX was to dump a file system to a tape drive, but we’re going to use it to dump the filesystem to a file. The second step is to have JungleDisk back the files up to S3.
Standard disclaimer: This is not at all supported by JungleDisk and if you choose to try this, you’re doing so at your own risk. This works fine for me, but your mileage may vary. I am not in any way responsible for any costs this may incur to you, or any damage this may cause.
What’s Your Cloud Backup Strategy?
Posted by: David Andrzejewski in Computing on February 20th, 2009
I wanted to follow up a previous post with some additional comments. This past week, a popular social bookmarking service called Ma.gnolia went down and lost all of their users’ data. Their users were understandably angry and frustrated. Citizen Garden did an interview with the guy who created Ma.gnolia and he brings up a question that I alluded to – we have a lot of content – a lot of data – stored all over the place online – what’s our backup strategy?
Online Safety – For Your Parents?
Posted by: David Andrzejewski in Security on February 9th, 2009
There are lots of articles with tips for parents on how to keep their kids safe online. But what about those of us who are the resident computer geeks in the family – how do we keep our parents and other family members safe from getting viruses and falling prey to phishing attacks?
We’ve all been through this – a member of our family somehow manages to get a virus or fill their computer with adware, and then we have to fix it. Of course, nobody did anything wrong or visited any bad sites – it just “happened.” We spend hours trying to fix it, and when we finally do, we realize that we want those hours of our life back. Or worse yet – it’s so bad that we can’t fix it, and need to reinstall everything for them.
I’m not implying that our parents are in any way unintelligent; I think the problem is that they don’t take these threats seriously enough.
So how do you – the geek in the family – prevent this from happening? One answer that you’ll hear from the geek community is “install Linux.” If you can get away with that without the guilt trip, go for it, but here are some tips for Windows users – read on.
Why TiVo Is Better
Posted by: David Andrzejewski in Entertainment on February 4th, 2009
You’ve heard of TiVo – Everyone’s heard of TiVo. The problem is, most average people haven’t actually seen a TiVo in action and don’t really understand what makes a TiVo better than their cable or satellite DVR. I think TiVo’s got a PR issue – people use the word DVR and TiVo interchangeably – and while a TiVo is a DVR, that doesn’t make a DVR a TiVo – there are a whole host of features that put the TiVo miles ahead of the other DVRs on the market.
I don’t work for TiVo, and they haven’t paid me for this or anything (although that would be nice in this economy 
). I’m just a long-time TiVo user who’s maybe a little too obsessed with the box… but if you actually own a TiVo, you’d understand.
And here’s another disclaimer: I am not a professional reviewer, there are DVRs out there that I’ve never seen, and there are probably newer software versions for some of the DVRs I have seen. These are just my personal thoughts on TiVo, and while there are good competitors out there that may excel in some areas, there are few that can match TiVo in terms of the sheer breadth of featuers it offers.
I’m going to avoid discussing the features that are common to all DVRs have and focus on what makes TiVo the best DVR available.
JungleDisk on FreeBSD
Posted by: David Andrzejewski in Computing, Software on February 3rd, 2009
For those of you who don’t know, JungleDisk is a utility that allows you to back up data to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Soon, it will also allow you to use Mosso’s Cloud Files service, which is similar to S3 but hosted by RackSpace. I recently won a free subscription to JungleDisk, thanks to Mosso.
I’ve got JungleDisk set up on my Windows machine and it’s working really well. I was looking around the JungleDisk website, and I noticed that you’re allowed to install the desktop edition on as many computers as you want. I’ve got two machines here at home – my laptop with Windows, and my file server running FreeBSD. JungleDisk doesn’t have a native FreeBSD version, but they do offer a Linux version. Seeing as FreeBSD does have a Linux compatibility layer, I figured I’d at least try to get it to work. So far, I’ve been moderately successful.
A Simple Backup Strategy
Posted by: David Andrzejewski in Software on February 1st, 2009
I am a strong believer that most non-IT people don’t take seriously the need to have a reliable method of backup for their important data. Just ask yourself: What happens when you can no longer access the data on your computer? It doesn’t matter what happens – you could or lose your laptop or have it stolen, or the hard drive in your computer could fail. Any way you look at it, your data is toast. What, then, would you do to recover it? It’s always a good time to think about backups, and to help, I’ll show you what I do.
I actually use two backup strategies: Image-based backups (on-site), and online backups (off-site) – and everything is completely automated.