matt's blog

Recently I had occasion to migrate my backuppc pool and config to a new machine, from a 32bit machine to 64bit

because I didn't have the foresight or read the docs my pool was not on it's own partition, for the most part eliminating my ability to do a block level copy of the data pool..

in the end this is how it went:

1. backuppc is installed on both machines; stop the service on both!

2. copy /etc/backuppc to new machine

3. using rsync, migrate the pool:
new machine: cd /var/lib/backuppc && rsync -vrlptgoDH oldmachine:/var/lib/backuppc/ ./
this takes a long time, for me around 15 hours on a 25gig pool. my old machine was quite underpowered though, and the raid was even degraded!
there were some errors but it worked well enough.

once that's done, start the backuppc service on the new machine and it should be running smooth (connect to web interface with password of old machine, kept in /etc/backuppc we copied earlier)

If you are changing architectures as I did, you may find the graphs on the web interface do not render, and apache2 spits out the following in error.log

"ERROR: This RRD was created on another architecture"

for this you need to get back into the old machine:
cd /var/lib/backuppc/log && rrdtool dump pool.rrd >pool.rrd.xml
send the resulting xml file to the new machine in the same dir
and on the new machine:
mv pool.rrd pool.rrd.old && rrdtool restore pool.rrd.xml pool.rrd
graphs should render now!

I should note the version of backuppc I'm running provides a script for creating an archive just for the purpose of copying, but I found it was most likely I didn't have the extra space to have a second copy of the pool floating around; next time I'd probly try this after pruning my pool quite a bit.

these threads/articles were quite helpful:
http://www.mail-archive.com/backuppc-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg0576...
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/BackupPC.html#other_installation_topics
http://n2.nabble.com/How-do-I-move-my-rrds-to-my-new-MRTG-system-td10750...

 I'm not fan..

 mmeija@c3:/mnt/raid$ time kedit
The program 'kedit' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install kedit
bash: kedit: command not found

 real 0m9.487s
user 0m0.972s
sys 0m0.312s

Well, time for another post I'd say. Del.icio.us blogme tag is starting to build up! (more accurately it's completely full and I won't post half of the crap I'd like to)

I guess first off is RogueLulz! Kuro5hin has a story on writing an 80's style roguelike game.
Kuro5hin is a great site.

DJB released all of his code to the public domain! While the value in this move remains up for debate, I'm confident to say it's some type of improvement.

I got some new headphones today; quite a contrast to the crap I was using before, though they are still sorta cheap mode (no active noise suppression)

Yesterday I was able to get full anonymous access to SharePoint working~ was pretty happy with this; certainly the next challenge is a custom auth provider that references our existing user access system. This post was critical to success for anonymous configuration. This screencast is also pretty valuable.

My brother turned 23 the other day? When did I get this old?

Anyway…
"do work son, do work"
now playing: sufjan stevens - chicago

Myself and a friend have started a site discussing Google's Android platform. I expect to be posting to the site soon, but at this point i've barely had an opportunity to get all up to speed on the initiative; my upcoming vacation time should help with this!

anyway check it out!!

http://fandroid.net

I thought I'd finally break down and try the publishing functionality with word 2007.. if nothing else perhaps it'll cause my post count to go up..

Anyway using my secret del.icio.us blogme tag here's some of the more remarkable links I have come across over the past week or two or three..

One of the highlights would have to be this article on sleeping habits; I've been trying to put some of these methods into use for my own life, so far I've failed… I just cannot sleep without the stupid tv goin in the background :[ and damn it, I hate television… if only I could get away with the Polyphasic sleep habits!

Coding4fun always seems to have some good articles… I think this one is really cool, for the fact you can get into some basic robotics very cheap, using c#! the article covers using Lego NXT with the xbox360 controllers, very cool.

There seems to be more and more cool Linq articles being posted, this one I really enjoyed for the fact the post covers a formula for calculating proximity (Presuming a spherical Earth) also covered is talking to a webservice to extrapolate geocoding data from addresses, though there are a number of excellent posts along those same lines.

And though I missed this for the first couple weeks, osnews covered the fact Microsoft plans to release the source to the .net base classes with the upcoming 3.5 release… very cool in my opinion.

That's all for now.. I've got a couple articles in the waiting on assorted SharePoint issues I'll try and post in the next week or so..

now playing: broken social scene - tbtf
Technorati Profile

Well, haven't made a post for a while.. thankfully I've gotten a good handle on del.icio.us and the associated firefox extension to the point that I've managed to keep a list of things i did wanna post about!

First off I came across an awesome index of university video and audio course/presentation content, you can check it out here.
I'd like to say I've had time to look in great detail but i have not.. from the list though there must be some really good stuff in there.

Recently I got a new/faster machine at work which enticed me to clean up visual studio a bit.. in the process i came across this post
that covers some sweet fonts and a nice white on black style colour scheme :)

Previously I'd posted about an application for refactoring sql, which is still a nice product.. but i've since come across something free which does the trick, and even better it can output c# formated sql! f-yeah.
The app is called SQL Pretty Printer
they have an online version you can tryout here, or grab the SSMS addin version here.

Over the last year i've been making use of Munin for monitoring most of my machines; well in that time i've always had trouble with the exim graphs that munin provides, and finally i spent the time to google the issue, eventauly stumbling upon this bug report post "Exim_mailstats plugin stops tracking if exim logs are compressed after a log rotation". Interestingly i have been using logrotated, though i wouldn't have guess it related to the issue.. nonetheless the cron line provided in that bug report as a fix worked like a charm for me - so if you notice your exim stats graphs stop working this is worth review... Also on the topic of Munin CPanel is now providing it as a plugin in the webhost manager interface! kinda convenient.

That looks like a decent enough post for the time being..

now playing: tv on the radio - ambulance

Well sat down this morning and came upon a couple really decent posts in my opinion... The Recommended Reading posts on the SharePoint Team Blog rules, and eventually got me to this list which I immediately recognize a few issues that have bothered me 10 Issues (and Resolutions) for SharePoint+Workflow

Well, good news first, Nintex Workflow 2007 has been released!!!!!!!!!
their previous release was a fairly solid product, but i expect a lot more from this one. stoked.

Another little bump in the road presented itself;
Getting an error: "Detected that the prescan.exe has not been run yet."
when loading the wssv3 Configuration tool.. this is a machine that had done an in-place upgrade from wssv2 to 3...
somehow i only got a real hit on this query from the spanish tecnet forums... all the same
/program files/common files/microsoft shared/web server extensions/12/bin>prescan.exe /all
fixed it right up. probly shoulda guessed that one..

that's it for now i think.....

now playing: AFI - smile

Well today i finally bothered to fix an issue where i was discarding the time of datetime stamps for the fact my code would throw an exception when trying to update that datetime field through managed code;;

a little googling and i found the solution:

IXMLDOMNode nodesubmittedBy = thisXDocument.DOM.selectSingleNode("/my:myFields/my:approvalData/my:submittedBy");
nodesubmittedDate.text = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss");


that custom string being the trick more or less..
it's likely i overlooked this somewhere but i didn't find it very easily through google so i thought i would make a post.