between the seconds of my life

The Windows Server Backup feature provides a basic backup and recovery solution for computers running the Windows Server® 2008 operating system. Windows Server Backup introduces new backup and recovery technology and replaces the previous Windows Backup (Ntbackup.exe) feature that was available with earlier versions of the Windows operating system. What is Windows Server Backup? The Windows Server Backup feature in Windows Server 2008 consists of a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in and command-line tools that provide a complete solution for your day-to-day backup and recovery needs. You can use four wizards to guide you through running backups and recoveries. You can use Windows Server Backup to back up a full server (all volumes), selected volumes, or the system state. You can recover volumes, folders, files, certain applications, and the system state. And, in case of disasters like hard disk failures, you can perform a system recovery, which will rest...

Have you ever spent an hour writing an email to your boss about the proper use of the company CMS, only to have him tell you the next day: " Bob, the instructions you sent me are way over my head. How about you just walk me through them every time I need to use the software? " You then have to work to keep your almost-tangible frustration in check, as you explain the same steps every time your boss needs help with the software. Instead of saving yourself time by writing down the instructions for your boss, you’ve ended up losing hours. Clearly, writing technical instructions, reports, budget proposals, or project summaries for management, marketing, or sales (basically, anyone not as technically knowledgeable as you), requires certain types of skills. Yet these skills have nothing to do with how much technical knowledge you have, but everything to do with how well you can convey that knowledge to someone without your technical background. In the past, I have met many techni...

rdiff-backup is a Python-based backup program that uses the sync algorithm. It is similar to sync in that it syncs a source directory to a mirror directory. It differs in its use of reverse diffs to maintain file versions trailing back from the current version. The program is available at rdiff-backup.nongnu.org . The current stable version at the time of this writing is 1.2.8. Source code and binary versions are available. The program is available for POSIX systems and for Windows, and it will sync across platforms. In addition to describing rdiff-backup in this article, I also demonstrate rdiffWeb, a Web-based interface for restoring files from an rdiff-backup directory. rdiff-backup uses librsync ( librsync.sourceforge.net ) as its rsync provider. For more detail, see librsync.sourcefrog.net/doc/librsync.html and, in particular, librsync.sourcefrog.net/doc/rdiff.html , which explains how the sync and diff process works. To paraphrase the information from the above site, librsync al...

Do you know where your friends are? If not, Google wants to help you find them. Today, Google introduced Latitude, a new opt-in feature that lets smartphone and laptop users share their location with friends and allows those friends to share their locations in return. Although not pinpoint accurate, Latitude can display your general location based on information from GPS satellites and cell towers. Latitude works on both mobile devices and personal computers. What Latitude can do Once you and your friends have opted in to Latitude, you can see your friends' Google icon displayed on Google Maps. Clicking on their icon allows you to call, email or IM them, and you can even use the directions feature on Google Maps to help you get to their location. Google says Latitude works in 27 countries and with many mobile platforms including iGoogle with your computer. The list of compatible phones are: *Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1 *iPhone and iPod touch devices (coming soo...

Should about time ... wait and see.

Other Name Server Problems Another common nslookup error you might run into is this: $ nslookup web1 Server:      10.2.2.2 Address:     10.2.2.2#53 ** server can't find web1: NXDOMAIN Here my name server at 10.2.2.2 responded to me but told me it couldn't find the record for server web1. This error could mean that I don't have web1's proper domain name in my DNS search path. If you don't specify a host's fully qualified domain name (for instance, web1.mysite.com) but instead use the shorthand form of the hostname, your system will check /etc/resolv.conf for domains in your DNS search path. It then will add those domains one by one to the end of your hostname to see if it resolves. The DNS search path is the line in /etc/resolv.conf that starts with the word search: search example.net example2.net nameserver 10.2.2.2 In my case, when I search for web1's IP address, my system will first search for web1.example.net, and if that has no records, i...

The scenario I use here to test troubleshooting skills is one that everyone has run into at one point or another—you try to load a Web site, perhaps even a reliable site like Google, and it won't come up. Because I covered local network troubleshooting in my last column, I'm assuming you already have gone through those steps and are ready to proceed past the local network. Even though this example deals with testing access to the Internet, you can use the same steps to troubleshoot problems accessing any remote network. Test Your Gateway For your computer to communicate with any other computer outside your local network, you must have a gateway (router) configured on your local network, and you must be able to reach it. Without getting into heavy-duty network theory, a router connects two or more networks and knows how to route packets between those networks. Your Linux computer has a list of all of the routers it knows about for each network of which it is a member and when it...

If you have a hardware or software fault then running snap will give you important information that will help with the diagnosis of the fault. Also if you log a call with IBM they will quite often ask for a snap to be sent to them via email or ftp Some examples of snap commands are shown below. snap -r Always run snap -r to remove old snap information snap -gLic Includes LVM information snap -bgc Includes SSA information snap -gRc Includes SCSI RAID information - in the pcixscsi.snap or in pciscsiraid.snap (find these at the bottom of snap contents list) snap -d new_directory -ac Includes ALL information. Creates the snap output file in a directory specified by "new_directory". This directory should not exist as snap will create it. Without the -d flag the snap output is saved to /tmp/ibmsupt Command syntax snap [ options... ] [ -d dir ] [ -v component ] -a Collects all system configuration information. -A Collects asynchronous (tty) information. -b Collects SSA infor...

For long we used Tracking IP based IPMP wherein we track the availability of a gateway on the network using ICMP Echo request. When the gateway IP fails to respond it is considered link is unavailable and NIC fails over to the standby NIC in the IPMP group. The biggest disadvantage here is that we use 3 IP addresses: 1 for the Virtual IP 1 for the active NIC 1 for the Standby NIC and ofcourse the overhead of the ICMP echo requests sent every seconds. This can be overcome using the Link based IPMP configuration where you only need only IP Address and there is no overhead of ICMP messages and the failover delay is lot lesser than that of the tracking method. And the added advantage of a very simple configuration. To configure Link based IPMP, create the hostname.<int name> files for the Active NIC and the standby NIC. For instance here, we use the bge0 and bge3 NICs as the IPMP pair where bge0 is active and bge3 is standby and hence the files hostname.bge0 and hostname.bge3 . To...