Been looking for decent Free (Open Source) backup tools. Surprisingly, there don’t seem to be (m)any. I’m just looking for something simple that will have easy setup, mixing and matching full and incremental backups across (automatic spanning) tapes.

• Taper – has a nice curses interface, but the stable 6.9 version only supports 4GB tapes, and v7 has been in alpha since last year (last release was May 2002)
• Amanda – I’ll use this as a last resort, but it’s just too… much, I guess, for what I want, more likely, I’ll glue together a perl script
• Flexbackup – decent looking perl script. Giving it a try.
• KBackup – a big bash script. will try it out.
• Sync2NAS – Windows mirroring tool

Guides:

• Linux Magazine: Linux Backup Primer
• Antipope: Backup tools
• Tape Autoloader on 2.4 Linux – doesn’t cover spanning

Storix has a free Personal Edition, although it has an X GUI, which makes it sort of useles for me. Arkeia Light looks promising. It’s a full version of their software but limited to 1 server and 2 clients.

• afbackup – a client-server backup system allowing many workstations to backup to a central server
• scsidev – alternative way of specifying disks, also: rescan-scsi-bus.sh (sh)
• SCSI info @ torque.net – including the SCSI 2.4 HOWTO
• Linux SCSI resources
• The Linux SCSI Generic (sg) Driver
• SCSI Command Utility

I recently picked up a Sony TSL-S9000L, and have been having a heck of a time getting it up and running. First it was the SCSI (an old ServeRAID 2 I’d picked up for $10) causing my linux box to not boot up (solved mysteriously by pulling components and recompiling the kernel), and now it’s trying to get the autoloader to work.

Now that I’ve been able to get it to boot successfully, it looks like the ServeRAID card is detected as /dev/sg0, and the tape drive is /dev/st0 – /dev/st7 (also /dev/nstX)…

• sony mt tsl – move to the next tape by sending the ‘offline’ command’. It works, but gosh-darnit, I wish I could get mtx to work
• Linux Reference: Tape Drives – this is a decent reference, an explanation of a big brother Sony TSL-SA500C
• Experts Exchange: Multiple tar backups on a tape device

A strategic comparison of Windows vs. Unix, version 2.0 – the Linux-versus-Windows decision for the faculty of a small college or university (would never work, but fun to read full of shit).

• Building a Custom kernel for Debian HOWTO Verison 1.0
• Debian Kernel Construction
• Creating custom kernels with Debian’s kernel-packaging system
• Kernel: Rolling Your Own

Looks like the LA Times used one of Mark’s Blogosphere photos (that I’m in) in their print edition article. Humorous Caption:

Attendees at “Live From the Blogosphere!” blogged away on their laptops even as they talked about the young art and science of blogging. Blogs, or Web logs, are online journals.

Mother of all bombs may be tested in Iraq war

Forgot to mention, the recent very interesting LKML thread which spoke about processor performance (and Linus’ dim view of Itanium). Definitely paints a different picture than, say Paul DeMone’s recent market analysis. (Two entirely different things, of course) Some interesting threads in /.

For those who don’t obsessively refresh boingboing (shame on you!): Giant Robot Costume – an awesome home made 9’4″ wolf-mecha costume (check out the rest of his stuff too, I like the Neon Man especially)

SnipSnap looks like most of my dream wiki-blogging tool (that I’ve been working on and off, mostly off, for a while). Looks much better organized than Tiki. I’ll have to look in their code to see how they’re doing their everything2-ish related table.

The last time I was this impressed was when I saw first saw Vanilla.