The solution:

1. Mount your backup device. In my case, it is a USB drive on /dev/sdb1. My server’s root is located on /dev/sda.

2. Turn off database, mail services and other disk intensive daemons for the backup: sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop (or via Webmin). Also shut down virtual machines for the backup that have their virtual drives on this partition.

3. Run a test drive of rsync:

sudo rsync –dry-run –checksum –progress –verbose –exclude-from=/root/exclude.rsync –archive –acls –one-file-system –delete / /media/sdb1/

4. Run rsync for real:

sudo rsync –dry-run –checksum –progress –verbose –exclude-from=/root/exclude.rsync –archive –acls –one-file-system –delete / /media/sdb1/

5. Restart your services and daemons: sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start etc.

6. If you want to be able to boot your system from the backup after a hard disk swap, install grub on its MBR:

sudo grub
grub> root (hd1,0)
grub> setup (hd1)

Also, run “sudo blkid” and adjust the Unit-IDs in /etc/fstab OF YOUR COPY according to the output for your backup HD (/dev/sdb).

7. Test your backup: Swap the disks and boot from your backup hard drive.

20 Jahre seit dem Abi… Hmmm, irgendwie fängt man an, sich nicht mehr unmittelbar der jungen Generation zugehörig zu fühlen

Verdammt, was sind wir alte Säcke - bald ist wohl mit den ersten altersbedingten Abgängen zu rechnen….

Danke an Boris und Marc fürs Organisieren.

Hinterher noch in die Boa, das wär ein gelungener Ausklang. Ich befürchte nur, dass die uns da gar nicht mehr rein lassen, von wegen nicht mehr Zielpublikum und so…. Richtig derb finde ich, dass es Kultläden wie das Musicland aka “Müsli” in der Reinsburgstrasse oder das Oz beim Bäcker Föhl schon gar nicht mehr gibt. Das saugt vielleicht…. (ok, Oz war damals schon Teeny Disco, da hätten wir eh keine Chancen gehabt, aber trotzdem…)

Freu mich jedenfalls, die Nasen von damals wiederzusehen, auch wenn man etwas wehmütig anreist….

Ich denk da nur an unseren ehemaligen Direktor, Dr. Frank Weidauer. Leider schon seit 1998 tot, werde seine Rede zur Verabschiedung unseres Abijahrganges nicht vergessen, in der er uns davor warnte “Yuppies” oder “Dinks” zu werden. Hey, ich hab seine Worte verinnerlicht - “Dinks”, also Double income, no kids wird bei uns ab Dezember, wenn alles gutgeht, wohl erfolgreich verhindert worden sein “Yuppie” ist ja schon seit einiger Zeit passe. Und wie es wohl Herrn Glätzer, unserem eher autoritären und gefürchteten Sport- und Erdkäs-Lehrer geht? Oder Herrn Beck, Chemie und Bio, mit scharfem Blick für alles Schöne ?

Salvete discipuli! (He Leute, falls ihr es nicht mehr wisst, das waren die ersten Worte, mit denen uns Herr Mommsen am ersten Schultag, zur erste Lateinstunde begrüsst hat!)

Und noch ein altkluger Hinweis:

Traditio obligat!

1940-1945: Schüler des ELG im Widerstand:

• Eugen Gerstenmaier
• Otto Hirsch
• Kurt Huber
• Werner Krauss
• Rüdiger Schleicher
• Alexander, Berthold und Claus von Stauffenberg
• Joseph Rieck
• Fred Uhlmann

2x notebooks, running Ubuntu Linux 8.04.1

1x fileserver with 2 virtual machines, including this website, running Ubuntu Linux Server 8.04.1

1x router (Linksys WRT 54G), running DD-WRT

1x mobile phone Motorola Razor V8

Not so bad for a 2 person household…..

And as soon as I have ordered my new desktop machine, there will be another Linux machine, making it six….

After installation of Logcheck, and Postfix as my mailer on one of my server, I got this:

Logcheck: machine2 2008-08-10 20:02 exiting due to errors

Warning: If you are seeing this message, your log files may not have been
checked!

Details:
Could not run logtail or save output

Check temporary directory: /tmp/logcheck.e11692

Also verify that the logcheck user can read all files referenced in
/etc/logcheck/logcheck.logfiles!

declare -x HOME=”/var/lib/logcheck”
declare -x LOGNAME=”logcheck”
declare -x MAILTO=”root”
declare -x OLDPWD
declare -x PATH=”/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin”
declare -x PWD=”/var/lib/logcheck”
declare -x SHELL=”/bin/sh”
declare -x SHLVL=”1″

To fix the problem, simply change the owner and group of /var/lib/logcheck to user and group logcheck:

sudo chown -R logcheck:logcheck /var/lib/logcheck

Seems to be a problem of the Debian/Ubuntu package, could simply be solved during installation. I found the solution here on the Logcheck developers mailing-list. I will file a bug in Launchpad as this problem obviously reappeared.

I was traveling for a family reunion. During the trip, I wanted to check the status of my DynDNS account since I changed my DNS settings to OpenDNS because of this DNS cache poisoning issue.

Since I forgot my password, I required a password reset. Great idea that was….

From the same moment on, my router could no longer update the DNS entry for vale.homelinux.net since the password was changed. Result: This site was offline for the last 2 days. Arghhhh!

I apologize.

But it got worse: Since I thought that the heat killed the server HD, I bought a brand new 500 GB SATA/300 Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 and a HD cooler. Nice investment, but completely senseless as my old server HD was and still is in best shape…. Had I only checked at least my logfile email address where I receive hourly status updates for my machine, I would have known that the machine was fine but DynDNS was not updated…..

DOH!

Thre is also a very informative Wikipedia page on Unetbootin.

2. Ubuntu LiveUSB Creator is very useful tool to get a Ubuntu LiveCD on a USB stick or other USB drive. It is able to even pre-install Adobe Flashplayer on the LiveSystem and also allows a persistent home section on the USB stick where you can save your setup and user data. Very convenient!

There is also a page on Wikipedia for Ubuntu LiveUSB Creator, and packages can already be downloaded here.

3. WineDoors is a user interface for administrating Wine, the Windows Emulator for Linux, with ease. The Wikipedia page of WineDoors contains an overview of the goal of this tool. The Ubuntu package is available here.

4. Overview on all user packaged packages in Ubuntu’s PPA (Personal Package Archive) - if your are looking  for a packages that is not available via packages.ubuntu.com, you may look here before your hunt it on the web.

Most blog spam comes from bots that either fake or, as a trojan, use Internet Explorer 6 of infected systems.

95% of all bot accesses of my site use Internet Explorer 6 as their user-agent. And boy, there is quite a lot of bot traffic - on this site, it has increased to about 20% of all page hits!

Since many of this bots are using infected Windows PCs from normal ISP subnets, blocking the well known blog spam IP address ranges did not help much. Blocking all IP addresses of the spam machines was also no solution as this addresses are used be legitimate visitors later on when the address gets re-assigned.

So I began wondering what kind of impact it would have to do the unthinkable: Blocking all visitors with user-agent IE6.

First, I checked my GoogleAnalytics data. Since GA relies on Javascript information for browser identification, it is more reliable with regard to real users and their browsers - GA can not be easily outsmarted with a faked user-agent. However, since many bots actually USE IE of their captured (infected) Windows machine, they also show up in GA statistics.

According to GA, 22% of my traffic comes from IE6 users. Wassup, which I run locally and which checks for user-agent, reports an even higher amount of 25% in the same period of time.

To get a clue how many of these visitors were humans, I further filtered for access to my comment URL: I consider this a clear sign of bot activity since people who access a specialised blog like this and want to leave a message will most likely not be so clueless to use IE 6. Even hardcore Microsoft fanboys who want to flame me will not do this as such a person would either use IE 7 or already IE 8 beta.

Next, I filtered the remaining group for direct access (no referer) to one of my articles: Another clear indication for bot activity as direct access without prior navigation would most likely require a bookmark for a real person. However, such a person who likes this site so much that he/she is bookmarking it, is very unlikely to use IE 6 - we are talking about a technical oriented Linux blog!

And, as said before, the result of this refined filtering was, believe it or not, that no more than 2% of all IE 6 page hits seem to originated from real human beings!

So I easily decided to block IE 6. I am using WP-Ban to block, which can identify unwanted visitors by specific user-agents. Immediately, blog spam (spam comments) dropped by more than 90%! Before, I had between 10 and 20 wanna-be comments with obvious content and goal. Now, I have less than 1 spam comment to moderate in a couple of days, without any plugin except WP-Ban.

And the best thing is: Since the bots keep coming and coming and coming (and keep reading the ban message), my visitor and page hit numbers did not go down - which confirms my assumption that the bulk of IE6 users at least on my site are bots. A real user would not come back again and again with IE6 after having read my friendly ban message which advises him or her to get Firefox

Of course, this website is specific - it is oriented towards Linux, towards people who have a clue and do not use IE 6 anymore anyway. The percentage of bots in the IE6 visitor numbers will be much, much lower on general interest websites with a broader audience and more users and possibly not (yet) allow to ban per IE 6 user-agent. And of course I am also aware that bot authors can (and very likely will) change user agents to other commonly used browsers such as Firefox.

This experience here however also reminds me not to trust too easily the browser statistic numbers in which Windows has still a 90% part of all web traffic. My rough guess would be that 3-5% of all Windows traffic is being generated by bots that maskerate as IE6 on Windows.

The Flashplayer 10 beta2 for AMD64 and i386 is already available in the official repositories for the upcoming Ubuntu 8.10 as a convenient Debian package. But It runs also fine on Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) and other Debian based distributions. It can be easily manually installed by downloading the .deb file, right-clicking on it and then installing it with GDebi.

Get the package here.

Update: Flashplayer 10 Release Candidate (RC) is already available for Ubuntu Hardy as well as Intrepid here on Launchpad. It will soon be available in the mentioned Intrepid repository and hopefully be backported to Hardy. The RC seems to be much more stable and less ressource hungry than the beta.

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