Ich wünsche allen ein gutes, gesundes und erfolgreiches Jahr 2010!
Wir haben gestern mit ein paar Freunden gefeiert. Das neue Jahr haben wir gleich angemessen mit Wunderkerzen begrüßt:
(Klick auf Bild für größeres Format)
Archiv der Kategorie personal
Gesundes Neues
Jan 1
Am Samstag waren wir wie schon viele Jahre zuvor bei Anne zum traditionellen Plätzchen/Pfefferkuchenhaus backen. Es ist wieder einiges zusammengekommen, und leeecker geworden!
Netti hat das halbe Wochenende damit verbracht, einen Adventskalender für mich zu basteln. Kann es kaum noch erwarten, morgen die erste Rolle aufzumachen!
“hello dbus” in vala
Nov 28
On the long flight back from UDS-Lucid I read the Vala tutorial on my ebook, and did some of the exercises. I was curious about Vala because it combines the speed and memory efficiency of C in a sane C#-like language with proper memory management, exceptions, and without the silly “close to the metal” faff that is usually required in C.
And indeed I wasn’t disappointed. It’s not as convenient as Python, but really not far from it, and it’s faaaast!
Today I finally got back to this and wrote my first D-Bus example in vala which does a call to DeviceKit-disks:
using DBus;
int main(string[] args)
{
Connection con = Bus.get(BusType.SYSTEM);
dynamic DBus.Object dk = con.get_object(
"org.freedesktop.DeviceKit.Disks",
"/org/freedesktop/DeviceKit/Disks",
"org.freedesktop.DeviceKit.Disks");
ObjectPath[] devs = dk.EnumerateDevices();
foreach (ObjectPath o in devs)
stdout.printf("%s\n", o);
return 0;
}
Compile and run it with
valac --pkg dbus-glib-1 dbus-dk.vala && ./dbus-dk
and voila!
when you go to dinner in a car^Wtank^Wbattleship^Wrazy something like this:
I savely arrived in our hotel in Dallas, Texas this afternoon, after a rather uneventful 14 hour trip from Dresden via Frankfurt. On the way I emptied my laptop battery with some small hacking and catching up on bug report email, and did a lot of reading. I also tried to watch Harry Potter 6, but the headphones they give you were so hideous that I hardly understood anything, so I gave up after some ten minutes.
In the early evening a small group of us went to the center to have a light Mexican style dinner (yummy), and someone came up with the monster above. Was quite an experience, veeery comfortable interior with leather couches and champagner glasses. Almost as comfortable as on my bicycle at home. 
Naturally I feel the jetlag and are pretty groggy now, but I still managed to stay conscious until now, after having a beer and two hours of chatting in the bar. It’s so great to see everyone again!
I’m looking forward to the Ubuntu Developer Summit next week.
Requirements
Through the last years I have used various own hacks for backing up my desktop(s). There are dozens of packaged backup solutions in Debian/Ubuntu already, but none of them did quite fit my requirements:
- KISS! no fancy web UI, storage formats, or millions of plugins and configuration files; backups should just be a normally accessible directory
- Supports standard backup strategy: daily backups for last week, weekly backups for last month, permanent monthly backups. This must not require my computer to be switched on all the time.
- Runs as my own user, so that I don’t need to set it up each time I reinstall my box
- No interactivity; any backup solution that requires me to do anything regularly is doomed to fail.
- Push-style backup to my server through ssh (or derived, like scp or rsync)
- Supports per-directory filtering to avoid backing up unnecessary stuff; my upload bandwidth is very small. (e. g. I don’t want to include
~/.cacheand in~/evolutionI want to ignore thecachesubdir).
rsnapshot
I have used rsnapshot as a basis for about a year now. It was originally intended to be used with pull-style, but that does not work for home setups behind a NAT. But it’s easy to use push-style with it (details later). It is by and large a fancy wrapper around good old trusted rsync, which is why I liked it from the start: It by and large just creates a full tree copy of your data for each snapshot, and uses hardlinks to avoid duplicate files. So restoring is easy and robust, you can use any file browser to get to your data.
File selection
If in doubt, backup should include a file rather than exclude it. I value completeness over small storage size, and I just check the volume of a snapshot from time to time to ensure that it doesn’t grow too big (it’s currently in the magnitude of 200 MB, which is small enough for daily deltas to be pushed through a slow DSL uplink without much pain). So my approach is to backup everything in /home/martin except explicitly configured files. For configuring the blacklist I use per-directory .rsync-filter files (which have builtin support by rsync).
Excerpt of my ~/.rsync-filter:
# global ignores
- *.log
- *.cache
- .*.swp
- .swp
- .*.lock
# only direct subdirectories/files
- /.ICEauth*
- /.Trash
/.aptitude
/.ccache
[...]
/download
/ubuntu
[...]
(In case you wonder, everything in ubuntu/ is either in the Ubuntu archive or in bzr, so no need to include this.)
Another example is ~/.Private/mozilla/firefox/t3znsw4q.default/.rsync-filter:
- /url*.sqlite*
- /*.bak
- /Cache
- /adblockplus
- /OfflineCache
Please see man rsync, section “FILTER RULES” for the details of the syntax.
Having and maintaining a sensible arrangement of your home directory is by far the most difficult aspect of backup, if you need to be stingy with bandwidth.
rsnapshot configuration
You need a central configuration file ~/.rsnapshotrc. The most important settings are the paths to back up, the destination directory, and the modes (daily/weekly/monthly). In addition I include my crontab into the backup, and add a post-backup action to rsync the backup tree to my server. Backups go to /var/backups/$USER on my systems, which is a different partition than /home (can’t stress that enough; today’s file systems are good, but not infallible).
config_version 1.2
snapshot_root /var/backups/martin
cmd_rsync /usr/bin/rsynclink_dest 1
one_fs 1
lockfile /home/martin/.rsnapshot.lock
rsync_long_args -F –delete –numeric-ids –delete-excluded
cmd_preexec /bin/sh -c ‘crontab -l > ~/.crontab’
cmd_postexec /bin/rm ~/.crontab
cmd_postexec /usr/bin/rsync -e ’ssh -i /home/martin/.ssh/id-backup_rsa’ -aHzvPy –delete /var/backups/martin/ piware.de:backup/tick-homeinterval daily 7
interval weekly 4
interval monthly 6backup /home/martin martin-home
cronnery
The last piece of the puzzle is a script which calls rsnapshot regularly with the desired mode. I wrote a small shell script (which lives in ~/bin/backup) which determines the age of the last daily/weekly/monthly backup, and calls rsnapshot with the correct mode argument. It doesn’t do anything if the last backup was done less than a day ago, so it’s designed to be called very often.
The actual cron job just needs to call it every hour:
$ crontab -l
# m h dom mon dow command
05 * * * * $HOME/bin/backup >/dev/null
And voila, from now on I have e. g. yesterday’s backup on piware.de:backup/tick-home/daily.1/.
Photo Quiz
Nov 2
Vor einer Weile habe ich ein wirklich interessantes und schönes Motiv gefunden und fotografiert. Errät jemand, was das ist?
A while ago I found a really interesting and beautiful motif and shot a photo of it. Can anyone guess what it is?
Update:
Natürlich habt Ihr es rausbekommen, es ist gefrorener Spinat in einer Schachtel. Ich habe das nur durch Zufall entdeckt, und fand die Eiskristalle einfach wunderschön.
Of course you got it right; it’s frozen spinach in a box. I just discovered it by accident, and found the ice crystals marvellous.
Hello Ween!
Nov 1
Ein gruselig schönes Halloween an Euch alle! Gestern haben Netti und ich wieder gebastelt:
Wir hatten mit einigen Freunden eine sehr schöne Feier. Danke nochmal an Sonni und Knäcke!
English:
Happy Halloween everyone! Netti and I made some nice pumpkin yesterday, and had a great party with some friends.
Die nächste Stufe…
Sep 27
… auf der Taekwondo-Leiter ist erreicht!
Gestern fand hier in Dresden mal wieder ein Lehrgang mit unserem Großmeister Kim Chul Hwan. Er hat uns ab um neun ordentlich auf Trab gehalten. Ich hab mich gestern auch mal wieder einer Gürtelprüfung gestellt, die ich auch bestanden habe. Formenlauf, Einschritt- und Freikampf gingen glatt über die Bühne, ich hatte nur etwas Bammel vor dem Bruchtest (Yop-Chagi), da ich den vorher noch nicht geübt hatte. Ging aber beim ersten Versuch durch.
Nun bin ich stolzer Träger des 4. Kups (blauer Gürtel)!
English summary:
Yesterday I earned the next Taekwondo belt at the training camp with grandmaster Kim Chul Hwan. Now I’m the proud bearer of the 4th kup (blue belt).
I moved my blog from its old wordpress.com home to my own server, replacing my ancient home page.
–
Mein Blog ist von seiner alten wordpress.com-Heimat auf meinen eigenen Server umgezogen, und hat damit auch gleich meine Uralt-Homepage ersetzt.
Today I returned from a great mini-vacation (long weekend). My parents and I visited my sister, in-law, niece, and nephew in Bavaria. We don’t see each other very often, it’s always great for me to see my niece and nephew grow, and play with them.
The highlight of the vacation was on Sunday, when my father, my in-law, and me went to Insbruck, Austria, on a 5-hour fixed-rope route climbing tour. It was my first outside climbing experience (I only did some indoor bouldering so far), and so I was looking forward to this new experience.
(click for more photos)
It was a “difficulty medium” trail, and indeed it was quite challenging at times. At some spots I couldn’t really climb any more, but had to cheat and resort to clinging to the rope. But it was fun anyway!
The Alps are such a wonderful place for enjoying fresh air, sun, and the nature!