Ahh, computer backups. I’ve said before and learn’t first hand how important they are over the years. My business backup routine is to copy the files from the server in another building. I used to have a ReadyNAS NV+ (image on wikipedia) and for many years it served us well. Actually, 8 years, which is … Continue reading “Hot topic – our backup server (overheating!)”
As always seems to be the case, a routine update of server software becomes a problem. This time it was updating VMware ESXi from 4 to 5. I know, I’m a little behind the times, but it was working, and it’s only a small office server… and I should have left it alone, sigh. So, … Continue reading “VMware consolidated backup missing a catalogue file – fixed!”
Executive summary: Stop reading, backup your computer. Done that? Let’s continue. [1] Second Executive summary: TimeMachine on my mac failed, I now use Carbon Copy Cloner. Yes, that cost me £26. Yes, it’s basically rsync (free opensource software I already use) but it’s easier to configure and has other useful features that I decided are … Continue reading “Backup! (Bye bye TimeMachine, hello Carbon Copy Cloner)”
How annoying. I’m discovering the hard way that a TimeMachine backup is NOT complete. It’s missing things all over the system. Sure, it has backed up my documents and applications but so far it appears to have missed: /private/etc/hosts (lost some custom DNS settings) Missing symbolic links, fixed by sudo ln -sn /usr/bin/g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.2(Thanks StackOverflow!) … Continue reading “Mac Timemachine backups are NOT complete”
I admit I’ve not been so busy posting the to blog this year. One thing that’s kept me busy has been learning Ruby on Rails making my first opensource application. I’m a hobby programmer, so the idea of sharing my code is worrying. I’m sure there are lots of errors, bad practice and so on. … Continue reading “Backups for Google Calendar – a ruby application”
Backups are important. This tenet will be learned the first time you lose important files. Knowledge in itself is useless, it’s the application knowledge that reaps rewards. Having learnt many years ago the cost of losing data from a computer, I’ve become a dab hand at setting up backup routines for my laptop, desktops and … Continue reading “Automatic backups of my windows laptop”
It seems just a few weeks ago that I posted about making regular backups of your computer. That’s because it was just a few weeks ago! Which makes me wonder whether the server at my office read the post too, and decided to test me. As well as regular backups the server has two hard … Continue reading “You did do that backup…. didn't you?”
wp-cli, a command line interface for WordPress, just saved me a big headache. It all began when I updated my server to the latest ubuntu LTS. That removed PHP5 support and replaced it with PHP7. That meant several of my sites stopped working as the nginx configuration had to change. With that done I thought … Continue reading “Upgrading my server to PHP7 broke wordpress admin interface (cloudflare)”
I’m building a web site for a charity that needs to take credit cards for tickets being sold. I’ve chosen to use stripe.com as: It’s simple to implement They take care of all the security and PCI DSS (I never get any card details to save, that’s a good thing). It’s not expensive (compared to … Continue reading “A quick note on my first steps using stripe.com”
It’s anti virus renewal time! Not the most exciting job of the year, which is why I’ve been renewing for at least 2 years at a time. Bottom line: So, after all my research, reading and testing, we’re sticking with Nod32 for another 2 years. We’ve been Eset Nod32 customers a long time, but for … Continue reading “BitDefender v Nod32”