This guy has put together some amazing lego creations that remind him of New York. No wait… They aren’t amazing, but they are quite funny.
http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/i-lego-ny/?em
There’s been enough actual interest in Rollout for me to move it to a community site. I chose Google Code because I work there, and it’s much faster than Sourceforge.
The new URL for Rollout is: http://code.google.com/p/rollout.
Unfortunately they don’t support git, so I have to deal once again with Subversion.
The new checkout instructions are:
svn checkout http://rollout.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ rollout
The manual is online there, and an issue tracker, so submit bugs!
Inspired by Alex King’s recent post on backups, I hacked together this short Perl script that will backup MySQL databases to Amazon’s excellent S3 storage system.
You can download it here. You will need to edit a few configuration items at the top of the script, to include your Amazon Web Services IDs and MySQL details. You will also need the Amazon::S3 and DBI perl modules. You can get them from CPAN.
$ wget -Omysql_s3.pl http://dparrish.com/files/mysql_s3.pl
$ vi mysql_s3.pl (enter your details)
$ chmod 755 mysql_s3.pl
$ ./mysql_s3.pl
It’s probably best to add it to cron so it will run daily. Something like this works nicely:
0 3 * * * perl /home/dparrish/mysql_s3.pl
I’d also suggest using S3 Firefox Organizer to manage your S3 account. It’s a Firefox plugin.
I’ve been mucking around with Comet, and ran into a situation which I couldn’t seem to find a solution on the lazyweb for. The problem was that none of the streamed JavaScript code blocks would be executed until the entire page was loaded.
I tracked it down to the gzip encoding module, which waits for all the data to be output, compresses it and sends it on to the browser.
You can disable gzip encoding for a particular directory in a .htaccess file (with Apache) like this:
RemoveOutputFilter DEFLATE SetEnv no-gzip
I can’t stand it when people release open source software, expect people to use it, and don’t provide any sort of documentation. I’m not the sort of person who enjoys writing doco, but I do think it’s required.
So here, in it’s entirety: the Rollout Manual
Continue reading ‘Rollout Manual’ »
Announcing a new Open-Source project: Rollout!
Rollout is a system developed to automate system administration on UNIX servers. It is primarily focused towards Linux, but could be adapted to Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.
It is written purely in Perl, and the configuration is also a Perl source file. Some Perl knowledge is required to edit the configuration, but copy-and-paste may suffice.
System Administration can generally be reduced to a set of steps, which must be completed in order. Some example steps include:
- Copy files, create symlinks
- Edit configuration files
- Start / stop services
- Add / modify users & groups
- Install applications
The idea behind Rollout is to automate all these steps in a configurable way. Rollout is by design idempotent - it can be run many times on a single server and produce the same results.
There is a certain amount of overlap between this and other projects such as puppet and cfengine. They all have similar goals. Rollout is designed to be very easy to extend (as long as you can cope with Perl) and very fast.
You can get rollout from my git repository at http://git.dparrish.com/rollout. If you’re using Cogito, you can run:
cg clone http://git.dparrish.com/rollout
This is the first public release, and as such is not expected to be everything to everybody. However it is in active production use and hasn’t destroyed anything yet. Use it at your own risk. The documentation included contains instructions on setting up a server and configuring clients.
Also, I’m enabling comments on this post (and I feel dirty doing it) so that people can submit bugs/patches/requests/complaints.
If you’re one of the lucky few using dbackup, and want to upgrade from 1.1.0 to 1.1.1 so things work (I really shouldn’t use a minor version number increase to fix such a major bug), you’ll probably want to run the following command in your backup storage root:
rename 's/^([a-z./]+).(d+).(d+).(d+-d+-d+-d+-d+-d+).(meta|data)$/
sprintf(”%s.%03d.%03d.%s.%s”, $1, $2, $3, $4, $5)/ex’ */*
This should be run as all one line. It requires the rename perl script, which is in the perl package on Debian/Ubuntu at least.
I’ve released a new version of dbackup today, version 1.1.1. This version fixes a sorting problem, which you would see if you ever get above level 10 in a backup run.
You can download the new version at:
| Source Tarball: | http://dparrish.com/dbackup/dbackup-1.1.1.tar.gz |
| Source RPM: | http://dparrish.com/dbackup/dbackup-1.1.1-1.src.rpm |
| Server RPM: | http://dparrish.com/dbackup/dbackup-server-1.1.1-1.i386.rpm |
| Client RPM: | http://dparrish.com/dbackup/dbackup-client-1.1.1-1.i386.rpm |
Along with this release, I’m also opening up my git repository, so you can grab the latest source yourself. If you’re using Cogito, which I highly recommend, you can run:
cg clone http://git.dparrish.com/dbackup
For instructions on using dbackup, see my original post.
dbackup is a disk-based client-server backup system for Linux or other UNIX systems.
It works on the principal that disks are cheaper and more reliable than tapes.
Backups are started by cron probably on a daily basis by the client. The client backs up individual filesystems / directories with tar and sends the result to the server, which stores them in a simple tree-based directory structure.
Restores are trivial, either by using the supplied restore client, or by simply copying the appropriate tar files off the server and uncompressing them.
Features
- Backup very large filesystems as long as you have the disk space
- Works with very large numbers of servers / filesystems
- No state is kept on the client, it’s all on the server
- Backup to multiple backup servers in round-robin
- Configuration can be global or per-server
- Authentication for client restores (optional)
- Supports optional gzip or bzip2 compression
- Supports client-side gpg encryption
- Trivial procedure for restores
- Daily / Full incremental backups
I believe in GPG for encryption and signing stuff. Here is my GPG key, which you can use to send me mail.
You can also get the key off any public PGP keyserver. The key ID is 0×4FAEE50C
Fingerprint:
F668 88AC 8232 2030 AF6E 7D5D DEDE DCC3 4FAE E50C