Code|Beta

I started backing up the files on that file server this past Monday evening…five days later…well it’s still backing up but we’ve made progress since last night I started to backup the second hard drive and hopefully it’s done by tomorrow.

And why does it take so long to back up? Well when I started the backup of the second hard drive I added the option to the cp command to show a “progress bar” if the copy operation is going to take too long…which we know is the case and I didn’t know this option actually existed. Well I forgot what the option was but will sure look for it and post it later on

There is no actual progress bar shown but it does show the bandwidth, the percentage copied and the ETA. I didn’t sit for an hour to watch the progress but I did notice that the peak was a bit higher than 1 meg and then it slowed down to less than 1 meg and add the fact that you are filling up a buffer which is then written to the hard drive, or so I believe, it just slows down everything there. I failed to notice that the USB ports are version 1.1 and not 2.0…sigh

So I began my next project…installing Zenoss. This is a tool that is used by network and system administrators to monitor multiple machines and devices that are connected on the network. Last night I got it installed on Irken, one of the two Sun Netra T1 servers that I have, and it runs pretty good. I also checked to see which devices on my network had SNMP running and get them monitored by Zenoss.

The hardest part was getting the SNMP Daemon running on Irken since the documentation on the Zenoss site wasn’t detailed enough. I gave up after a couple of minutes of trying to get it running with the snmpconf and I find this tool quite complicated. I googled and found a better guide that actually got it up and working by editing the actual configuration file.

Right now the Linksys WRT54G, which is running the DD-WRT firmware, and the HP printer are successfully added to the Zenoss application. I attempted to add my Linux desktop but that didn’t go so well since I was unable to get the SNMP running so that it can report the information…still working on this. I’ll attempt to get the Windows desktop running and monitored through Zenoss. The Linux machines in the network might not end up using the SNMP service but send the information over SSH to Irken but I won’t give up easily.

After getting Zenoss deployed and working correctly I will start to work on getting the Linksys WRT54G to act as the network firewall so that I can get back Zion, the other Sun Netra T1 server, and use it to set up that VPN that I want. I had upgraded the router to the VPN version of the DD-WRT software but I was reading about it and appears that I could run into bricking my router because of the file being too long and not being able to fit in the memory. I’ve thought about virtualization but currently only my Windows machine is multi-core and since this isn’t a machine that will always be at home I don’t want to start adding services to it that when I move this machine will become unavailable. Sure I could use any of my single-core machines to do virtualization but I’d want something with a bit more performance…that’s my point of view and I’m sticking to it.

-LM