Most of us don’t have native IPv6 Internet connections at home. Fortunately, it’s easy (and free) to get connected to the IPv6 Internet. Here’s how to get your FreeBSD box connected.
Mar 012010
I spent some time thinking about backup strategy, and I decided for my purposes, I’d like to handle the staging process (getting all the files put together), and I’d like the backup solution itself to simply upload the files – but since I want to do nightly backups, I’d like the backup solution to have incremental capabilities.
I narrowed it down to two possible solutions – Tarsnap and Duplicity. Both support incremental backups, both are command-line capable. I decided to use Duplicity because it uploads directly to whichever back-end service you use – be it Amazon S3 or an SFTP server . Tarsnap uses S3, but that’s your only option, and they do some processing for you, and because of that, it costs more.
Now, on to the details.
FreeBSD – Colorize Your Console
Computing Comments Off
Feb 282010
The FreeBSD console is colorless by default – but most terminals and SSH clients these days support color. The benefits of colorizing your console should be pretty obvious. It makes your life a little easier – you don’t have to do as much mental processing.
Mar 152009
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.
Mar 012009
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.
Update, November 2009: I am no longer using JungleDisk to back up my FreeBSD box. Jungledisk recently released version 3.0 of their software which does not include a command-line Linux version in the standard desktop edition. I was advised to stick with the old version if I want to continue backing up. Instead, I chose to change over to Duplicity. I will write a post on Duplicity in the near future.
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.