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Bacula is a great backup solution for any company. I had it running here for that last 1.5 years and I recently moved it to a better server, A poweredge SC1425 with a ultra 160 scsi card which is inturn attached to a Quantum SDLT 320 Autoloader. I’m using the 1.36.x version (standard sarge debs) there has been alot of changes to how autoloaders are handled in new versions 1.38.x which could have prolly have solved most of my problems that I encoundered when switching the system over.

Here are a list of issues encountered.
1. Debian defaults to the user bacula for director/sd.(but does not have permissions to
(R/W) /dev/sgx or /dev/nstx)
2. bacula wasn’t issuing the unload command for the autoloader.

After some amount of messing around trying to get bacula to issue the unload command… I was just about to give up and go about compiling 1.38.x when it started to work.Thats just weird, broken on minute and fixed the next.

I took the lazy way out and edited the /etc/init.d/bacula-dir + /etc/init.d/bacula-sd and changed the user (-u) to root (-g) to root. Not the most secure, but it works

Other than these little issues bacula has never let me down. The irc channel is a good place to get help and there is also a mailing list but i do think that it has too much traffic… (I have 6000+ unread mails)

I Wanted to go to “The London Philharmonic Orchestra playing Beethoven Violin Concerto” it’s on Saturday, 4th of March at the National Concert Hall,I even booked a hostel thinking that 2 months would be ample time to get a ticket, how wrong I was, it sold out around the 10th of january. Just my luck. There is nothing else I would like to see until April so maybe I should book my ticket now.

In work, I had been rather pissed off with the way things have been going lately… I feel that way too much has been expected of me. I am the tech person for two productions (feature film and a TV series). Running around after every users problems isn’t what I planned on doing for a year! and on top of that I’m suppose to make sure that everything is running smooth on gear that isn’t the most up-to-date. Over the last two weeks I took delivery of components to upgrade the entire IT system. We have 7 new poweredges; 2 x 1850′s and 5 x SC1425′s also 1 x 220s powervault 4.2TB(scsi) KVM,UPS and last but not least a dell rack cabinet.
I set about installing debian sarge on the SC1425′s (very easy) They all have two sata hardrives configured with software raid. Then using a trick I overheard a Heanet guy talk about I swapped out a harddrive from another Box, booted up,partitioned the hd and added the partitions to the software raid. So instead of taking me an hour to install a box it take the lenght of time it takes to mirror the contents of the swapped HD to the blank HD.( 20 min’ish).
The 1850′s have scsi HD’s and use the megaraid driver..but not the driver that comes with Sarge (too old) so I have to build a custom CD using 2.6.12 (later editions don’t have devfs support). I am going to use Qemu to test the ISO before I burn it to CD, Quite handy little app.

Have not blogged for a while….
Since the start of the new year I have been feeling rather sick,but ignored the symptoms. It finally fell on me like a tonne of bricks and I now have a mild dose of the flu…

Setting up some computers at the studio.

I took this by chance, I think the white smokey stuff is my breath.

Heres a photo of the damage I did to my finger….

I took this on christmas eve at about 10 o clock at night.

Took this also on christmas eve.

As I haven’t posted anything since 18th of December I have alot of catchup posts.
I was installing some network ports in the current studio, I’m usually careful but I severily cut my middle finger on my right hand. After I did it, all I said was ” Eh! I have to go to A&E”. I think it was due to reciving some not so nice news that morning in the post…( lost concentration etc), After about 5~ hours I recived 3 stitches and given 4 dressings to be replaced every 2 days until I got the stitches out that following thursday. I have lost feeling in someparts my finger but the doctor assured me that it will return eventually… I lost a whole day because of that and I still haven’t made it up yet. I still can’t type properly as it is still quite weak.

We had a nice christmas dinner at my sisters house, and as the studio employes people from around the world; some couldn’t make it home so we had them for dinner too. An American,Canadian and french. It was very nice having them for dinner. I bought books as presents(catch 22,1984,Grapes of wrath) for them so they wouldn’t feel lelt out of the christmas present giving.

I had to work a couple of days over the christmas making sure that computers are setup for people that arrive on the 3th of Jan.

I’ve got to order a bunch of servers on the 3th from dell. As the quote we got from them was very competitive in comparsion to other qoutes.Thanks to some ilug people for that heads up.(you know who you are)

hmmm, have I left out anything…
oh yeah!
Happy new year to everyone!