Cron Update

Regular readers may remember that I've been trying to automate the checking of podcasts using Armangil's Podcatcher. Back in November, I wrote this post explaining my frustration. A comment from my riding buddy Steve gave me some good things to try, which helped me get the script going. Unfortunately, no progress was made on the cron front.

Here's what gets me. The command, or a script containing the command, works fine from the command line. The job takes several minutes just to check all of the feeds I watch, plus additional time for any downloads. I can see the ruby interpreter chewing up CPU in the top display. However, when I put either the command or script in cron, ruby runs just for a second.

I'm wondering if there is a file permission or visibility issue. Both seem to run under my user - not as root. Unfortunately, ruby doesn't tell me why it gives up so quickly.

I checked the syslog, but there are no entries from ruby - just the line from cron saying that it's starting the task. Is there another log where I can find more detail, or can I ask ruby to be more open with its issues?

In the meantime, I'll keep running the script from a command line every day or so.

New Backup Server - Part 1

I'm starting with an eMachines 600MHz box with 256MB of RAM. There is a 10GB harddive, and I just installed the 250GB drive which will hold the backups. The operating system of choice is Ubuntu 7.10 Server.

Right of the bat, I can't seem to use the USB keyboard in the installation program. No worries, as I have a PS/2 model around here somewhere...

I'm up to the partitioning step, and I've formated the entire 250GB drive as 1 ext3 partition which is set to mount as /backup. On the 10GB drive, there was already a swap area, with the rest as ext3. I set that to mount as root, and erased the partition contents. Odd, the drives are showing up as SCSI, while they are actually PATA.

Partitioning done, the base system is installing.

It's been stuck at 83% for at least 10 minutes. Can't be good. The hard drive is blinking occasionally. Patience, Dan ... it finally moved.

At the screen asking if I want to install any server software, I chose only the OpenSSH option.

And it's reboot time.

Next, I'll do the usual stuff. (Plus, I installed lynx - my favorite browser)

Looks like in this version, unlike 6.10, the Universe repositories are already enabled.

No problems. Ready for Part 2

New Backup Server - Preamble

OK, so it's been about a month since I installed the new drive in the file server, and things have been working great since. The next task is to put the other new 250GB drive in the backup server so that I can backup all of the data on the file server - rather than excluding half of it. My goal is to be able to restore the entire system if needed.

I didn't really mention before that the old Compaq machine that I assigned to the backup role has always given me trouble. At power up, I had about a 50% chance of a successful boot. A couple of weeks ago, I installed the new drive, and it wouldn't boot for anything. It wouldn't even POST. I disconnected the new drive, and it booted once, but never again. After monkeying with it for an evening, I removed the new drive, and chucked the rest of it in the trash! If I can't get it to boot without lots of TLC, I probably shouldn't rely on it for my backups.

So, now it's time to start over. I've got another machine, which was once my daughter's Xubuntu machine, but she's moved on to my old desktop, so that box is now available.

I'll start with Part 1.