The 10 irrefutable rules of backing up.

(Ok, so maybe they aren’t irrefutable, but they’re 10 I came up with while writing the article. NB, These are obviously targeted at a business environment but the essence should apply at home too)

1. It can’t be manual

Humans are idiots at the best of times… we’re also forgetful and lazy. Any backup solution that relies on someone to backup various files to a CD or external hard drive just simply isn’t going to work too long unless you’re super-admin-person.

2. It has to be often

Backups that happen weekly just aren’t really good enough. Humans may be idiots but we can get a lot of work done in a week. There’s also that dreaded feeling of knowing that you have to put your brain through that same disgusting task AGAIN… that is assuming you know what you did in the last week. Daily backups are great, twice daily better.

3. It has to be off site or you might as well not do it

The reality is that most times backups are used to rescue idiot users who deleted the wrong version etc. It’s flipping awesomeâ„¢ that you were able to rescue Sue’s excel spreadsheet that she spent the whole morning on, but really, what are you going to do if your server room burns down… or gets stolen… If the backups are sitting on a removable hard drive or on a tape in the tape drive then your backups are gone. Sue’s excel spreadsheet wasted 4 hours. Not having the company data is often a death sentence for a business.

4. Have a backup of the backup

If all your company does is send off dlt tapes to a secure offsite security company then what are you going to do when you discover that the dlt tape was dirty and can’t be recovered? Sure, this is highly unlikely… but so is a fire in your server room… If all it was going to take to fix was a cheapass 500 gig external drive sitting on a rack then you’ll hate yourself for not having one.

5. Test your backups

This really leads on from number 4… Too many times I’ve heard someone say “I thought it was doing a full backup but actually…“

6. Publish your backup policy

I’ve personally found out the hard way that the “server” backups didn’t include my code… If you publish the backup policy you at least give the lusers a chance at realising their impending doom.

7. Have backups aimed at mistakes and backups aimed at catastrophes

I’ve hinted at this in some of the rules above. You want to be thinking of backups with two hats on. First hat is “Rescue Sue’s excel from 5 hours ago“. Second hat is “OMFG the server room *actually* burnt down“.

8. Incremental is king

Ideally you want to be doing 4 Days (Mon,Tues,Wed, Thurs), 3 Weeks (Fri1,Fri2,Fri3), 6 Months(M1,M2,M3,M4,M5,M6), 2 Years (Y1, Y2). Yes, that’s a lot of backups… start at the beginning and see what you can do. Yes, it is paranoia, but businesses often need to go back for various reasons… Sometimes it will be as simple as finding an old database that suddenly became important again… or you might find yourself having to sift through mail folders after dodgy employees leave.

9. Dont skimp on cost

This one is particularly targeted at management. Backups are not valuable – they are priceless. If you force your techies to work with substandard gear, old tapes or pathetically slow systems you are putting your business at risk. There is no point in having a backup solution that is so slow that it can’t backup all the data in a day.

10. Grow with your needs.

Storage is not THAT expensive. Budget for backup systems growth just like you would budget for any new server hardware. If your needs can justify it, consider buying a full backup server. It is not a safe or productive solution if you keep on running over your tape limit and not getting a successful backup out the door. If individual departments have stupid amounts of media consider breaking them out of your main backup policy and develop a new one that suits them better… It might be that certain departments don’t need more than a few days incremental backups of their data.

In case you’re wondering what prompted this post… I’ve just set up a backup policy in my house. Our important data (Photographs, Thesises etc) gets stored/backed up on the server; that data is additionally stored (rsync) on a second HDD in case of primary HDD failure and then the most critical data is rsync’d up to a remote server sitting on the internet. This all happens twice daily and takes about 30 seconds due to the magic of rsync.

Why some people just dont "get" the "Internet"…

(Alternative Title: When not to call someone a racist)

I am increasingly amazed at the interweb. People seem to not realise that the world is rapidly becoming more and more online to the extent that it’s probably likely that no matter who you are, your name, or your bussiness’ name is being Googled on a daily basis. Which brings me to the guy who called me a racist.

A while back a few of us went to a restaurant called Nonna Lina‘s for lunch. The entire event sucked. The food was bad, the service was bad and the owner/manager overcharged us. I was so appauled I wrote a very strongly worded email to the restaurant and BCC’d a bunch of my friends.

Now a little bit about expectations… What did I expect from them? We’ll, to be honest I expected a reply… maybe even a sorry. I would have been very impressed if they had said something like “Hey, sorry you had a crap experience, won’t you come and have lunch on us and see if we can make things right.”

Alas there was nothing… not even a nasty reply. (Actually their first email address bounced so I had to find another which didn’t bounce, so I know they got it)

So obviously they didn’t care… My little email and my 50 friends didn’t count. Then, a few weeks later, I posted the email on my blog.

So now I am the 3rd result in Google for Nonna Lina.

A month goes by and a few days ago I get an email alerting me to a new comment on the story. It’s from the owner. I assume he Googled his restaurant’s name and got a little fright… but not enough of a fright to apologize… instead he writes a badly constructed list of excuses, demeaning my own ability to discern good food from bad food. Insists that their shocking food is true Italian Fare… the fact that 11 people found their food disgusting must mean that I run in very plebby social circles.

Then he strangely tells me that I should talk more… weird… I think what he’s trying to say is that we should have spoken to him then instead of writing about it on the internet… except, he forgets, we tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t listen and instead walked outside and started smoking.

Then, as if all of this wasn’t enough, he calls me a racist because I said that his waiter’s English was bad and we struggled to communicate with him. I must point out that his email had shocking English too. So now I’m a racist who doesn’t like Italian people… I must tell that to my Italian friends. Also, I’m constantly ripping off my girlfriend about her funny colloquialisms. Dammit, I must be a racist.

Actually, it had never occurred to me that his waiter was black until he brought it up.

LVM for the WIN.

I finally got around to getting LVM (Logical Volume Management) up and running on my server at home. A few people had mentioned that it was quite difficult and I must say that it can be a bit daunting but really shouldn’t be.

I pretty much followed this article (http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_lvm) but I must admit that there were some things that I was confused about from the outset, hence my little introduction and LVM FAQ.

The basics

LVM allows you to combine many physical drives or partitions (Physical Volumes – PV) into one “Virtual Drive” (Volume Group – VG). You can then create “Partitions” (Logical Volumes – LV) on that Volume Group. You can add new drives or partitions to you Volume Group whenever you feel like it. Additionally you can resize your Logical Volumes whenever you feel like it too. (Image courtesy of the article… I’ll copy it onto my own server when I get back to a shell)

LVM Basics

FAQ: (Feel free to mail me questions and I’ll add them here)

Q. Why would I want LVM?

A. If you have lots of media spread across a few drives LVM can be a godsend.

Q. Do I need to reinstall linux in order to install LVM?

A. No, you can install LVM whenever you want and you can undo your changes whenever you want.

Q. What’s the best way to start?

A. I’d say you should start by playing around a bit. (You’ll need to read the article in order to understand how to do these things)

  1. Resize one of your partitions to free up 5gigs somewhere
  2. Create a 5 1G partitions to play with.
  3. Create a Physical Volume for each of your partitions
  4. Create a Volume Group and add 3 of you 1G Physical Volumes to it. (3 is just a random number, you can create a Volume Group with 1 Physical Volume)
  5. Create a 3G logical volume, Format it (ext3 is good), Mount it somewhere
  6. Put some files in it
  7. Add the rest of your 1G Physical Volumes to the Volume Group
  8. Create another 1G Logical Volume
  9. Resize your original 3G Logical Volume to 4G. (Unmount it first then lvextend() and then run resize2fs for FS’ like ext3.)

Q. Is it dangerous?

A. Yes, if you do stupid things like lvreduce() thinking that it wont wipe the data on the logical volume.

Q. Is it redundant?

A. No… that’s what RAID is for… but you can add RAIDed redundant partitions to your LVM and then your LVM will be redundant.


All in all I’m happy and almost near my life long goal of having a 1 terrabyte folder.

Later.

Can you spot the two faced bitch?

So, someone recently pointed me to some random girl’s blog about how she doesn’t like it when people rip off George Bush… she feels that we don’t have the life experiences to know what it takes to run a country and so therefore we should just shut up. Besides the fact that she is patently wrong and by her argument the only people fit to criticise bush would be other presidents, she is also, sad to say, a two faced bitch.

From her flickr site

hyrax2.jpg

Ahhhhh, man… so touching…. look how her heart is touched by the poor disabled child…. Someone like that would never make fun of disabled people on her blog…

Oh shit, wait…

From her blog

No no, shut your pie hole

Oh no. You. Didn’t!.

Paris Hilton would be so proud.

PS. I’m not giving this bitch any linkage… I’m sure she has a cellphone, if she wants to be famous she can use it like Paris.

My list of Web Zen and Learning

GoldenI’ve put a list together, for the guys at my new company, of all the websites that I read on a daily/weekly basis with regards to web development, design, usability and open source. I can not encourage you enough to spend some time on these sites. They will make you a better person, people will love you and butterflies will spontaneously appear whenever you are around.

A List Apart – http://www.alistapart.com

Jeffrey Zeldman’s awesome website. He’s a well respected guy who gets the top people from all over the world to contribute articles. The site focuses on design, web standards and excellent use of CSS.

Think Vitamin – www.thinkvitamin.com

The best thing about the new world order is that everyone seems to be playing nicely together. Think Vitamin is a place where you can learn a lot from the people on the advisory board like Cal Henderson from Flickr, Dave Shea form CSS Zen Garden and Jeff Veen from Google.

CSS Zen Garden – http://www.csszengarden.com

You can not comprehend the real power of CSS until you spent some time on CSS Zen Garden. Remember that every single design on the site uses the exact same html… it’s only the css that is changing!

Script.aculo.us – http://script.aculo.us/

Want to make your website do all the pretty things that the big boys do? A lot of them, including Google etc get some of their javascript Web 2.0 loveliness from scriptaculous.

User Experience Mag – http://www.uxmag.com/

Again with the big boys, but this time all about user experience…

Matt Cutts’ Blog – http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Matt Cutts is one of the few Google employees encouraged by Google to blog. He heads up the team that matters the most – Web Spam… essentially the guys who decide whether you’re invited to the party or not. We also share a wordpress template.

Jakob Nielsen – http://www.useit.com

Jakob is the godfather of usability. He’s been around for a long time and has seen it all before. His site is the epitome of usability and he encourages, sometimes a little too passionately, everyone to follow suit.

Web Style Guide – http://webstyleguide.com/

A website about how to build websites… seem a bit redundant? Think again. Here you’ll learn all the best practices; developing a site specification, information architectures, even how to write your copy so that people stay on your site. This is the knowledge that separates the companies that are constantly struggling against themselves and those that Just Get It Done™

Firefox – http://www.getFireFox.com

Firefox is not only more secure, more stable, more functional and has a better javascript debugger, but it also has some web development plugins that help you do your job faster and better. – Install the Web Developer Toolbar!

Things that are currently pissing me off

Ok, this is the first in what will probably become a regular thing — Me ranting about things that piss me off… In the interests of all things sane I’ve decided to keep a list and then once in a while write a post, include all of them and call it done. Also, please note, I’m pretty sure my language wont stay family friendly.

Scientifically formulated Mr Muscle

Ok, basically this rant could essentially be categorised as bullshit fluff copy. From the actual Mr Muscle advertisement “Mr Muscle is scientifically formulated…” Oh.My.God! It is SCIENTIFICALLY formulated… It must be so much better than the UNSCIENTIFICALLY formulated stuff I’m using currently. Maybe it’s fictionally formulated using every second word in the seminal paper on the topic, Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs And Ham. I realise that people buy into pseudo-science garbage, but how much longer must we continue to dumb down the public.

Honourable mentions go to the the radio ad for a night club in Cape Town called Coup d’état. One line goes something like “Elevate your mind and lift your soul in our …” ARE YOU STARTING A GOD DAMNED CULT IN YOUR NIGHT CLUB? If not, please stop talking like someone who’s about to hand out the cool-aid laced with god juice so we can all go “home” via the space ship hiding behind Hale-Bopp.

Mobile “Content”

I think for quite a while now my number one pet hate is, and will probably continue to be, mobile “content”… and I put the word “content” in quotes because really, how god damned retarded has the world got that we actually pay money for someone to tell us what our name “really” means or whether your boyfriend’s name and your name = true love and picket fences. It’s a fucking equation… a pseudo mathematical random equation that some coder probably came up with in about 3 minutes. You’re better off flipping a coin and at least at the end of the coin flip you still have your R5. I’m not even going to talk about how stupid it is making serious life decisions based on a friggen SMS… Didn’t you people read MacBeth?

I think I might just come up with my own set of mobile content just to see how retarded the public really is. How about this: “The are you going to die tomorrow?” Quiz? Just sms “DieTomorrow” to 66677 and we’ll tell you whether you’re going to die tomorrow. Of course the service will always reply with a “No” and I’ll always be right… and on the occasion that I’m wrong, who gives a fuck, you’ll be dead.

Then of course there is … mobile porn… porn, on your phone. 3cm x 4cm of porn, on your phone. I understand that most of the people buying this stuff probably don’t have internet or are just so incredibly vacuous that they can’t figure out where to find porn on the internet, but still, it’s porn, on your phone. Pictures of naked woman, ON YOUR PHONE? I’m actually too annoyed for words.

I honestly hope that the only demographic stupid enough to spend money this way are so incredibly stupefied by the testosterone pumping through their voice-breaking, pimply-faced bodies that an act as retarded as wasting money on 100 pixel wide pictures of nude girls is somehow justified by the temporary retardation otherwise known as puberty.

Then we have the “oh my god, how stupid do you have to be to enter these things” competitions. This famous golfer can be quite a tiger, can you unscramble the letters in his name and figure out who it is. His name is “TGIER WOODS”. I swear, I would love to meet the person who is a. Clever enough to figure it out AND b. stupid enough to think that they are in fact clever and should waste R2 by entering.

Of course there’s always the Burping Frogs and other bullshit wallpapers, ring tones and assorted rubbish. I sat in a restaurant a while ago and even though the food was good, the only thing that went repeatedly through my head was: ‘I swear I’m going to stab you in the face with a pencil if you don’t stop playing that frog ringtone while I’m trying to eat; I don’t care if you’re 11, I will resort to violence‘

The only other thing left to moan about when it comes to cell phones are the “Dating Services”. Like Campus Flirt. They advertise on the radio constantly and every time I hear the ad all I can think about is that someone is going to die soon. Yes, its morbid, but look at the myspace murders in the states… Any time you create a channel for people to “flirt anonymously” you can be guaranteed there is at least one psycho waiting for someone to prey on. And unfortunately, as we’ve covered before, young people (and we know they’re not all over 18) do stupid things like agree to meet their new best friend somewhere private.

Most abhorrent about campus flirt is that you have to SMS “MEET” to some number… then they spell it out for you: M – E – E – T… just in case you were looking for something a little more serious.

Lastly, and this one is really a short technicality
Has anyone noticed that the SABC is running ads for their newly commercialised studios? You can now go and get your band recorded there etc. (Now I know that technically this has always been the case as a few of my friends worked in their studios for years, but now that they’re advertising it I’m starting to get annoyed). I’m paying my TV licence… It is the right thing to do… But don’t go and start using my charity (because I consider it charity) to fund studios and then make money out of it.

If the government of this country was stupid enough to give you the right to demand that every cathode ray tube owning household HAS to pay a TV licence fee or be fined, then you sure as hell better not be running a second commercial venture making money on the side.

The end.

Do not eat at Nonna Lina

To anyone reading this for the first time: Please note that this post dates back a long time and for some reason is repeatedly proving rather popular. I get a lot of emails and comments about this post, mostly positive and some negative. If you have a valid comment then by all means post it, but if all you’re going to do is tell me that I’m a dick for complaining, then I suggest you don’t waste your time… Also, read my blog, You might find that I’m actually quite a nice guy. The gist of this entire saga is that we had shocking service and Nonna Lina has repeatedly, for almost two years now, refused to simply say sorry, but instead resorted to excuses and insults.

Also, read this semi-update to the story.

(This is a classic Arbitraryuser in the form of an email I sent that dates back to November 17th 2006.)

Today at 1pm a group of us, 11 in total, decided to have lunch at Nonna Lina… This was because they are currently punting their “Special”…

Their offer was one of the meals on their “special menu” and either a soft drink or a beer. The prices, R39 and R45 respectively.

Here is a list of why you should never ever eat at Nonna Lina:

What pizza is meant to look like
Not Nonna Lina Pizza
  • A few of us ordered the “Salami” pizza. It was crusty, oily and they use cheap cheddar cheese. But, the cherry (ha ha) on the top was the absolutely atrocious amount of “salami” on the pizza. We counted; There were 3 slices of the thinnest, smallest, cheapest, nastiest salami, cut into quarters and spread over the pizza. AND THAT WAS ALL. Just nasty cheese and 3 pieces of nasty salami.
  • The service was terrible. EVEN THOUGH WE HAD PRE-ORDERED OUR MEALS the last meal was placed on the table about 20 minutes after the first.
  • One of the meals was wrong, but fearing another wasted half hour someone took one for the team.
  • They sell pasta and pizza… but the dont have Tabasco Sauce… We know they’re trying to be cheap, but come on! Maybe just buy the generic stuff.
  • The waiter struggled to bring the drinks to the table and needed to get reminded constantly. There were only 2 other tables so being “busy” is not an excuse.
  • The beer was warm.
  • Besides being generally bad, the waiter also struggled with english, which will probably explain the next 2 points perfectly.
  • Then came the killer… When the bill arrived it was more than expected… There were two meals we didn’t even have and even though we had only seen their “special menu” apparently one of us ordered a meal off the main menu.
  • Then the real kicker. The Savanah and Castle didn’t count as alcholic beverages… And the Appletizer wasn’t a “Soft Drink” so the unlucky souls (me included) had to fork out R45 for a shitty pizza and an extra R15 for our drinks.
  • No mess up on this scale would be complete without the owner/manager fighting with us about the bill and eventually deciding that it was time to light up a smoke while we were still arguing with him… Eventually we paid up and left, never to return again.

So by my count, Nonna Lina owes me a beer… and you know what, they can shove it… Keep it for a rainy day when all their customers have finally decided that the R8 Boerewors roll outside the Spar on Kloof Street is a better option. More appetising, more tasty and served with a hell of a lot more class than Nonna Lina could dream of — A paper serviette and your choice of 5 sauces in recycled plastic bottles.

Regards
Jonathan

ps. Feel free to pass this on to anyone you think might make the mistake of going there.

    Update: Nonna Lina never replied to my emails… I think that speaks volumes.

    Update 2 [29 Jan 2007]: I finally got a response via this site from the guy who owns the place. Amongst a bevy of poorly constructed excuses he called me a racist for bringing up the fact that his waiter didn’t have a very solid grasp of English. Ummm ok. Add that to the list of reasons why not to eat there.

Moving on is hard to do…

So I’m moving on… after more than two and a half years at my current place of employment I’ve decided to kick the bucket and leave a winning team to join another, hopefully just as winning team with a bigger horizon.

Moving on

But yes, I am bailing… and the extent of my bail is becoming more and more obvious with every day. Today I struggled with the spawn of satan that is one of our legacy content management tools. Like peeing into the wind, anything written in Microsoft Access is a bad idea… Let me make myself clear: Anything written in Microsoft Access is a bad idea… ever.

Even worse than that is software written by the receptionist, which this was… and the architecture proves it.

I could go on and on about why the system is bad, but I can sum it all up in 3 points:

The 3 Rules of System Development with Microsoft Access

  1. Do not develop systems using MS Access.
  2. If you do develop systems in MS Access, make sure that the architecture and development is done by qualified developers.
  3. If you chose to ignore rules 1 and 2, make sure that you have a roadmap for replacing your creaking MS Access system before you realise it is creaking. See Addendum 1.

Addendum 1.

The life expectancy of a system written in MS Access can be calculated using the following equation:

[days before catastrophic system failure] = 365/[days to develop]

Simply put, this means: (For the mathematically challenged)

  • An MS Access application that was developed in one day will last 1 year.
  • An MS Access application that was developed in 1 year will be broken by the time it is finished.
  • An MS Access application that was developed over 5 years was already critically broken 4 years ago.
  • The more you work on an MS Access application, the more you break it.

Hence forth shall this be known as Endersby’s Rule Number 493

HTH.

j.

Usability really isn't that hard…

I know that “Web Usability” is oft touted as being this hard thing… like something akin to the truely black magic that is Search Engine Optimisation, but really, it isn’t… Yes, there are hardcore people studying eyetracking and all kinds of usability studies, but really, all I’m talking about is a little bit of common sense.

Take for instance the people who designed the Morton’s on the Wharf website.
This is their splash page:

Mortons on the Wharf Splash

Now, firstly, we all know how passée splash pages are. You do know this right… I mean, it’s something we know, like sharing toothbrushes is just not cool.

Yes, in the 90’s, you were super cool if you had a splash page, especially if it was animated. Morton’s has one of these. It says you need flash and directs you to download flash if you don’t.

So what if I don’t have flash? What if I’m on my phone? Firstly, sites designed with flash that don’t NEED flash are just retarded, but we’ll pretend that this site actually needed flash. (Technically it does, but really, it doesn’t)

So I come along wanting to get the phone number to call to make a reservation… But alas, I need flash, and I dont have flash, so instead I get told to download flash… Opera Mini on my phone doesn’t do flash so I’m stuck. All they needed to do was give me their phone number and email address and I would have called. It would have been TRIVIAL to say
“This site needs flash, we suggest you download flash. Alternatively you can call us at 555-2303 or email us at reservations@mortons.co.za”

Am I right or am I right?

Ps. Mortons has good food.

j.

First Post!

Yo, welcome to the blog…

I recently decided I had had enough of shared hosting companies and wanted my own real box on the internet somewhere. (Yes, my box at home is “on” the internet, but telkom being telkom, I didn’t really think it was a viable option to use it)

So here we are, everything you see before you has been set up in the last few hours. Apache, PHP, MySQL, WordPress, Linux and knowledgeable friends for the WIN!

More to come…

j.