[wplug-announce] The Open Pitt, 4th ed.

[Beth Lynn]

                               THE OPEN PITT
       What's cooking in Linux and Open Source in Western Pennsylvania

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Issue 4                       September 2004 
www.wplug.org
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In this issue:
   Flirtin' With Disaster
   Hardware Failure Hits Close to Home
   August Roundup
   In Brief: Tom Rhodes Interviewed, Bill Gates Donates to CMU, Robotics
             Institute 25th Anniversary
   Ohio LinuxFest 2004

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                               Coming Events

Sep. 18: Installfest.  10am to 5pm, 1507 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU
Sep. 25: General User Meeting, Topic: Using Open Source to Solve E-Mail
          Problems.  10am to 2pm, 1507 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU
Oct. 2:  Ohio LinuxFest.  10am to 6pm, Columbus, Ohio: see article this
          issue
Oct. 9:  General User Meeting, Topic: Voice Over IP Using Asterisk.  10am
          to 2pm, 1507 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU
Oct. 16: New User Tutorial, Topic: Linux Basics.  10am to 2pm, 1507
          Newell-Simon Hall, CMU

                     The public is welcome at all events
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Flirtin' With Disaster

With the memories of Hurricanes Frances and Ivan fresh in our minds, this
might be a good time to take up the issue of disaster preparedness and
recovery.  It is tempting to think that you won't have a data problem.
After all, perfect copies of billions of bytes fly around inside your
computer every day.  But anyone who has experienced a problem will tell
you that things can go very wrong, very quickly.

The first thing to assess is just what is valuable to you.  This will help
determine what level of effort you will put into your plans.  If the most
important item is your Frozen-Bubble high score file, you'll likely need
to do less than if you're protecting a customer database.  Let's look at
some potential trouble areas and common countermeasures.

Software failures
All software has bugs.  While most popular software is pretty stable, if
you like to run bleeding-edge or developer releases you are at increased
risk of causing data corruption.  Factor this into your backup strategy.
Also worth considering is setting up a different partition, hard drive, or
even a whole separate machine for running experimental code.  Keep user
errors in mind as well; a mistyped "rm" command can wreak havoc.  Only use
the superuser account when necessary, and run servers as separate users so
they can't stomp on each others' data.

Hardware failures
Hard drives are perhaps the most common point of failure.  In the last
three PCs I have owned, I have had two hard drives go south.  It does
little good to backup your data from one partition to another--when errors
start showing up, they're likely to be spread across the entire disk.
Copy your data to another drive, or even better some form of removable
media.

The good news is that most modern hard drives incorporate Self-Monitoring,
Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART).  SMART can give notice of
impending failures and provides extensive self-checking features.  The
smartmontools utilities are a good way to perform a check-up.

Memory errors are less common, but can be particularly tough to track
down.  You can give your x86 PC's memory a thorough workout with
memtest86.  If a server is handling mission-critical data, you will want
to use parity memory, which can detect errors, or ECC memory, which can
also correct some errors.  Support for this memory must be built into your
motherboard for it to work.

Environmental factors
In case of fire or flood, your entire site may be ruined.  That's why
off-site backups are important.

While a UPS can keep your system up and running during a power outage,
keep in mind that heating, cooling, and communication systems may lose
power as well.  Many UPSes can tell your PC to shut down when its battery
runs low.  See the apcupsd and Network UPS Tools projects.

Backups and recovery
While good old tar can be used for archiving, there are more sophisticated
options like Amanda, Arkeia, and BRU.  For backing up over a network,
rsync saves time and bandwidth by only sending changes, not entire files.
Be sure you practice restoring files before disaster strikes; a backup
does no good if it can't be read.

A live CD distribution like Knoppix, PLAC, MkCDrec, or SystemRescueCd can
help in recovery.

Sources of information online include the Linux Complete Backup and
Recovery HOWTO and the Red Hat Linux System Administration Primer.

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Hardware Failure Hits Close to Home
by Beth Lynn Eicher

The machine penguin.wplug.org which serves WPLUG's website and mailing
list was down for about 10 days.  This was the first extended outage since
moving to the Computer Science machine room of Carnegie Mellon University
in February 2003.

On September 2 around 4pm, the entire campus lost power for well over an
hour.  Without air conditioning, the machine room temperature rose to 80
degrees F.  Penguin stayed up for 20 minutes with the help of a UPS, but
in the chaos was not shut down cleanly.

With power and sanity restored later that evening, penguin was booted and
all seemed well.  But the machine crashed unexpectedly the morning of the
3rd.  The hard drive and its data were never the same since.  After a
filesystem check that took several days, we were able to recover all of
the important data.

To help prevent a similar event from occurring, WPLUG bought an IDE RAID
card and two 160 GB disks for redundancy.  Total cost $225.

During the outage, a temporary web server displayed a simple page for
visitors to www.wplug.org.  It included a plea to give to the hardware
fund via Paypal, netting $75.  We hope to recover the rest of costs by
auctioning off the replacement disk we received from RMA and some other
hardware.

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August Roundup

Aug. 8 Open Source Picnic: Held in Whitehall's Snyder Park, WPLUG's third
annual picnic attracted about 25 people, from tall to small.  Games and
balloon animals provided amusement throughout the day.  A true feast was
laid out, including a brain-shaped jello mold!  Photos of the event are
available on the Web at <http://www.wplug.org/picnic/>.

Aug. 14 General User Meeting: Bill Moran of Potential Technologies spoke
on Samba.  Most Windows systems use the Server Message Block (SMB)
protocol for file and printer sharing, and Samba allows UNIX-like systems
to speak the SMB protocol.  He covered the major concepts and gave some
examples to get up and running quickly.  You can find his slides at
<http://www.potentialtech.com/wmoran/>.

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In brief...

An interview with WPLUG's Tom Rhodes was featured in Daemon News,
discussing his work on the FreeBSD Handbook.  Though perhaps not as widely
known as Linux, the BSD-derived operating systems are robust, actively
maintained, and have roots nearly as old as that of UNIX itself.  And of
course they're Open Source.
<http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200408/trhodesinterview.html>

                                  *   *   *

Construction of the Carnegie Mellon's Collaboration Innovation Center has
caused parking and access problems for WPLUG meeting attendees for over a
year now.  Just when it is nearing completion, CMU will soon break ground
on yet another building.

On September 14, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $20 million
to help fund a new building.  It will be just east of WPLUG's meeting
space, Newell-Simon Hall.
<http://www.cmu.edu/cmnews/extra/040914_gates.html>

Mr. Gates visited CMU on February 25 to give a lecture to computer science
students.  During the time for questions, one student offered him one of
the free Knoppix Linux CDs donated by Potential Technologies being
distributed outside the event.  He accepted, yet asked: "How much is it
worth?"  <http://www.tcpulse.com/2004/02/27/news/billgates/>

Maybe $20 million?

                                  *   *   *

CMU's Robotics Institute will celebrate its 25th Anniversary with an event
titled "Robots and Thought" <http://www.ri25.org/> from October 11-14.  It
will showcase a number of robots built at CMU, many of which use Linux.

Beth Lynn Eicher contributed to this article.

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Ohio LinuxFest 2004

Just a few hours' drive away, the Hyatt Regency Columbus Hotel will host
Ohio LinuxFest 2004 on October 2.

WPLUG's own Bill Moran will be giving a presentation on handling e-mail
with Open Source.  Other speakers slated to appear are Paul Ferris of
KeyCorp; Rich Bowen of the Apache Software Foundation; Colin Walters of
Red Hat; Deryck Hodge of the Samba team; Dan Rusek, Mark Richards, and
Brian Maseck of Novell; Charles Peck, Josh Hursey, and Josh McCoy from
Indiana University; and Greg Boehnlein of N2Net.

The day will be filled with sessions on the Apache web server, Security
Enhanced Linux (SELinux), mathematical modeling using Beowulf clusters,
desktop Linux, Open Source telephony, and more.

Jon "maddog" Hall, a long-time Linux backer in the computer industry and
executive director of Linux International, will give the closing address.
Other special guests are Scott Collins of the Mozilla Foundation and
Jeremy Cole of MySQL.  For more details on the event or to register, see
<http://www.ohiolinux.org/>.

===========================================================================
The Open Pitt is published by the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group
<http://www.wplug.org/top/>

Editors: Elwin Green, Vance Kochenderfer

Copyright 2004 Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group.  Any article in
this newsletter may be reprinted elsewhere in any medium, provided it is
not changed and attribution is given to the author and WPLUG.