Computerjargon.com

I’ve struggled over the years to find a good, reliable solution for maintaining secure backups of my files. As my much of my real-world possessions become digital versions of themselves I’ve grown increasingly paranoid about losing them.

I’ve been averaging about 1 lost hard drive per year for the last 4 years. When a begins hard drive to fail I typically have to scramble to clear space somewhere else, or start digging through my archives in hopes that I actually did back up everything to one of the other corners of another hard drive. I’ve tried building dedicated server machines, I’ve tried a multiple hard drive configuration, but it is all too complicated.

Running parallel to all of this has been my growing concern for my carbon footprint. Sure, it sounds wacky. Why should I be concerned? I’m just some guy in MN. But I figure becoming more green isn’t a choice, but a lifestyle change. If we don’t start to become aware of our ecological impact now then we won’t be able to solve the problem later. We recently downsized from the truck to the Mazda, all new light bulbs are compact fluorescent (most that are needing to be replaced were already halogens). This article got me thinking about the waste of power I was spending keeping so many machines on during the day.

So to cut out one whole computer from the Broken Complex I decided to outsource my backup. I chose to use Mozy, for mostly the unlimited backup space and zero transfer charges. For 5 bucks a month I can backup any data on my machine. Mozy runs in the background constantly checking for new files. Once a night any new files are uploaded to Mozy. So far I’ve been quite satisfied with the service. Mozy makes it clear that they are not an offsite hard drive facility, Mozy is a backup solution, that’s it. It doesn’t work well as a file dumping grounds. It’s job is to simply ensure that the files selected on the local machine are successfully backed up to Mozy’s servers. There are other services that tackle both backup and remote storage, but they were cost prohibited to the amount I need to store.

The initial backup of 80 gigs of pictures and music took 6 weeks due to Comcast’s upload limit of 384kbps. It  finally completed the other day and we reclaimed a speedy network connection again. After the upload completed I was able to shut off a computer that had been running for 3 years. The computer room has become quite quiet.

A few weeks ago I signed up to receive a free FON wifi router. FON’s concept is simple, build a community of users willing to share their bandwidth through an open Wifi connection. The only problem is it requires purchasing a $30 wifi router from FON. Well, that was until they ran a promotion to hand out a few thousand free routers. I filled out a form and didn’t expect much. FON literally asked me for only my name and address.

To my surprise I received a little package this week. Sure enough, I had been sent a little FON wifi router. The router itself is nothing too impressive. It’s small enough to fit in the palm of my hand and has three LED status lights on it. All I needed to do was to plug it in to my existing wired network.

The router uses the OpenWRT firmware originally created to run on Linksys hardware. I thought this was pretty ingenious of FON. By utilizing existing software they are able to provide some pretty slick functionality. The router has a public and private side. The private side can be used for a secure internet connection like any other wifi router. The public side, though, is a proxy into the FON community.

When I first set up the router I was redirected to FON’s website to configure the router to work with the community. I had to choose what type of node I wanted to be. My choices were either 1. be free and then be granted access to other community routers or 2. charge people $3 to connect to my router. Being in a suburb and right next to a Caribou with free internet connectivity I can’t imagine making much money off of it. I choose to be a free node.

So, if you’re ever cruising the streets of Crystal looking for free wifi, check out my drive way. It’s got the best there is to offer…in a driveway.

If you’re reading this post on the website then you’ll know what I’m talking about. Inspired by the word “free” and “web designs” I decided to redo Computerjargon.com’s layout. I ran across the Open Source Web Design site which contains thouasands of free to take website templates. This wonderful one is provided by Andreas Viklund. I give him mad props for doin’ the world good with a little open source lovin’.

Although I’ve been a web app developer for many, many years I am very horrible at the design aspect. I can make a web app work great, just don’t ask me to design one.

Most of the basic site functionality has been moved over. For those dying to comment, comments should be working. I’ll be cleaning up a few little nuances along the way. Hope you enjoy.

Chad declared yesterday that I need to clean up L1R1, the affectionate name for my computer room. After thinking about it I thought, “How DARE he pass judgement on the cleanliness of my computer room! Who does he think he is?!” I realized that for as much grief and heckling I give to Chad, Tina, and their dog I shouldn’t react so harsh.

…I still plan on slashing his tires after lunch.

I recently went to visit my grandparents who live on the Mississippi River in La Crescent, MN. For the longest time their neighborhood has been comprised of cottages and cabins. 20 years ago their river-front property wasn’t more than a weekend get-away for most. But over the course of the last 8 or so years builders have moved in, bulldozed most of the cottages, and built monsterous houses that span entire property lots.

I don’t typically bring my laptop with me when I go to visit. My grandparents use dial-up for internet. This time I decided to, just to have something to occupy my time. Before I left I had installed an application called NetStumbler that does a pretty good job locating and listing wireless access points. I fired it up at the grandparents and was surprised to find someone in the neighborhood had a Linksys router. Gitty with excitement I got to work.

The signal was weak and seemed to come and go. I spent the better part of a night trying to figure out where the signal was coming from. After a little “war-walking” (That’s what Courtney calls it) I found that it was coming from a house to the south. The signal was still too faint for my to get solid communication to the DHCP server on the router. I attempted to set my IP address manually guessing the network default was either a 10.0.x or 192.168.0.x based network. I had no luck and gave up for the night.

The next morning the fog was hanging a little lower than before and the clouds were moving in. Perfect for bouncing a wifi signal my way! I fired up my laptop again and started away. After letting my Intel wifi card do its thing for a few extra minutes I was finally able to retrieve an IP address from the DHCP server, on the 192.168.1.x network. I was sooo close! Damn! The signal was still very weak and I had a hard time doing much of anything. I pulled up a web page and showed off my trimuph to the family. They were less than impressed but it solitified my nerd status.

So I did it. I accomplished getting on to the internet through a wireless connection no faster than my grantparents dial-up connection that already existed. But it was fun nonetheless.

After the Great Crash of 2005 I decided to beef of my systems for backup and recovery. The last component was installed on Sunday. Let me give you the rundown of the setup:

The linux server (a.k.a. the green machine) has two new 200gig SATA hard drives. They are set up in a hardware-based mirrored RAID. The old hard drives were also mirrored but it was software-based. Under a software RAID the disks are formatted a little differently. When I was attempting to recover from the crash I had a hard time finding anything that could read the RAID with one of the disks missing.

Secondly, I set up a NAS disk hanging off my windows machine. Ok, ok, it’s not a *real* NAS, but it is an external hard drive connected to a networked PC. So I guess you could call it a Networked Area Storage.

Each night the critical files from the green machine are rsync’d to the Windows machine. Then each night the critical file from both machines are rsync’d over to the NAS. So at any given point I have multiple duplicates of just about anything.

Lest I not forget to mention the UPS I purchased just prior to the crash. It has already saved my computers on a few occasions.

One of the items I lost in the server crash of ‘05 was my Subversion source control server. I had to answer the hard question, “What do you do if your source control server goes down?” I had two options: 1. start re-writing code as quickly as possible or 2. start scrunging around the corners of all my computers hoping to God one of them had a copy of the source. I lucked out, my laptop had all the latest code. In fact, it even had changes I hadn’t checked into the repository. w00t. That’s one big win for me.

So I brought the repository back online yesterday. This time I opened it up for anonymous read access. Feel free to browse the projects over on Broken Industries.

Grub boot error 17

I stared at that phrase for two days. I worked some computer magic, tinking with in inner depths of my computer. After all my hard work it now said:

Grub boot error 21

I decided to take a sledge hammer to the computer, metaphorically, of course. I ended up hitting it too hard losing all my data, along with all my family’s websites. Pissed would be an understatement of my feelings.

So I started to rebuild. I focused my attention away from the server and back to my desktop PC. I needed to do a little research. My desktop hard drive spun for a few minutes, lights started blinking, then pow, nothing.

My desktop PC failed 4 days after the server crash. 3 brand new hard drives later I’m slowly rebuilding everything back. The server is mainly back online. All data, including archived email, web pages, and pictures are gone, never to be seen again. So I present to you the Computerjargon.com 2005 edition, REBOOTED.

Google released a desktop search tool earlier this week. The tool searches files, emails, and instant messaging logs to create your own personal Google cache of your hard drive. I installed it at work and have been randomly looking up some words. Here are some of my results:
Butt : – 9 emails, 10 files
Ass : – 33 emails, 1 file
Dork : – 2 emails

Nerd : – 7 emails
Shit : – 13 emails
Dammit : – 9 emails, 1 file
Jason : – 9,349 emails, 21 files, 3 web history
Motylinski : – 8,711 emails, 15 files

Jason Sucks – 21 emails

I’ll have to run the suite of searches on my home computer too.
Edit:
Per suggestion:
Poop : – 4 emails

Mozilla’s latest version of Firefox takes the cake when it comes to features. I converted over to Firefox about four months ago. I was impressed with it’s speed and reliablity. Not to mention the growing number of virii targeting Internet Explorer had me hiding behind the couch with tin foil over my head.

The PR1.0 version of Firefox implements a new feature called Live Bookmarks. If a site has an RSS feed Firefox notes it at the bottom right corner of the browser window. The RSS feed can be bookmarked and the headlines from the site will show in the browser bookmark list. A very handy little feature for those of us that browse the Internet at break-neck speeds. RSS is a very handy little standard which cuts through all the glitter of the Internet to deliver information quickly and precisely.