It is great when you have reached a state with a friend from were on you just blind trust into his or her recommendations.
This is for sure not easy to get and needs a special situation or a longer common history getting familiar with each other.

But back to the topic… A few of you might have got out of my earlier postings that I recently have bought myself a new gadget to play with. Something new, fancy, from principle not necessary and perhaps just an expensive new toy …. we will see.
The truth is that I like working with it since the beginning. And even everything is very different, at the end and looking behind you will find yourself working with as you would never have done differently before very quickly.

With the intention to speed up the learning curve I asked a friend for a few recommendations - personal likes and favorites - and got back a list out of ten software packages as the minimum requirement to add to feel found and happy.

As for the list was coming from one of those friends I have such a mentioned "trust in blind" relationship I didn’t requery things and straight away started to install all packages following her list top down.

Now there was this SuperDuper pointed out as a must have on that list and it directly answered me a nagging question. As for me working as a system administrator for years during the past, backups are essential to me.  But backups and a full system recovery are two very different things!  Someone not being able to restore / repair a system from scratch bringing  it exactly again into an equal state like shortly before the crash …. is not allowed to call himself/herself a system administrator.

On the other hand having those experiences restoring system by tape boot for example then restoring a standalone backup, recovering or cloning windows system with Ghost and Ghostwalker, sysprep, tar, cpio and and and ….. I’m sure you never will be able to image me looking when I had a short glance through the options of SuperDuper …. You want a full and bootable copy? Fine! …. then I will do ….

WOW …. Thats Tops!

Today I got and answered an Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) user survey.

They said they take my feedback very seriously (am I now important?!) and it will be used to help them to determine how best to invest in these products and the processes that support them …..  I hope it will!

To be honest I made a lot of different experiences using Oracle RAC and I’m happy about them looking for feedback. Not every experience was good I made and especially with one installation I had a lot of trouble last year before I headed of in my (then urgent needed) longer vacation.

But on the other hand nobody is perfect and with a look on those great variety of platforms and ports they do support someone I easily able to understand that the one or other issue will occur sooner or later.

And it is not only the product quality and stability defining the overall quality at all. Also the offered manufacturer support and the access to their Knowledge database  (in that case called Metalink)  are important factors for a generell success.

In this specific case I even made the acquaintanceship with an extraordinary friendly and supportive lady working for Oracle Egypt being responsible for my TAR - working together with me for several weeks trying to solve my issue - I’m still in contact today.

Last questions was (as usual for sure): Would you like to participate in future? Yes for sure, I would!!

Lately I have written about a great Unix tool called SCP. Now recently I had the need to equal two Unix filesystems from which one was a remote filesystem in oversea. Now how to do that?!

Now you could just copy all the stuff from the remote system (I’m sure you know all about … tar, gzip, zip). For sure a secure way to go! But also very time and resource intensive for sure. Could that be done more elegant? ….  Someone could also have the idea to use a “better” ftp client being able to compare directories. Clever eh?

But are you aware how it stretches the needed time for it when you put a 3rd system in between? Anything better?

A few of you might now know a brilliant little helper out of the Microsoft Ressource Kit called robocopy?! Be carefully with the /MIR option …. read first and be aware what you are doing!

But I guess just only a hand full of you all here will know that this gorgeous robocopy is just the Windows equivalent of a UNIX tool called rsync.   Go for it!  rsync - Thats Tops!

Unfortunately there seems to be no sunshine without shade! So even moving to Media Temple was easy doing and since being there I had no issues anymore, I started to feel annoyed about them not offering a working home directory backup utility like the prior provider did within his CPanel.

Just I thought complaining about will not really help you to get your back-ups done and so I decided  to write my own little replacement script for it. Perhaps someone will be happy using it too …

#!/bin/bash
# FTP Backup by Michael Lohmar
# Script: ftpbackup.sh
# Author: Michael Lohmar
# Contact? info@mikelo.com

if [ $# != 3 ];then
echo “”
echo “Shell script for backing up one given domain.”
echo “Usage: $(basename $0) domain_to_backup [FTP/NOFTP] [DEL/NODEL]”
echo “”
exit
fi

version=1.0

##### INSTALL INSTRUCTIONS: STEP 1 #####
##### START ENTER YOUR INFO HERE #####

serverip=yourserver.com
# Your remote servers IP address
# EG: serverip=192.168.1.1

serveruser=youruser
# The FTP login for the remote server
# EG: serveruser=bob

serverpass=yourpassword
# The FTP password for the remote server
# EG: serverpass=mypassword

localdir=/home/your/local/folder
# WHERE LOCAL FILES ARE TO BACKUP
# NO TRAILING SLASH
# EG: localdir=/backup/folder/daily

sourcedir=/home/your/source/folder
# WHERE LOCAL FILES ARE TO BACKUP
# NO TRAILING SLASH
# EG: localdir=/domain/source/folder

remotedir=your/remote/folder
# FTP directory where you want to save files to
# This directory must exist on the FTP server!
# NO TRAILING SLASH
# EG: remotedir=/serverdirectory

##### END YOUR INFO HERE #####

##### INSTALL INSTRUCTIONS: STEP 2 #####
# CHMOD the script to 755: # chmod 755 ftpbackup.sh

# Add the script to a scheduled cron job to run as often as you like (if wished!)

# In SSH do crontab -e, then paste in the following
# 0 6 * * 0,1,3,5 /home/admin/ftpbackup.sh
# This does a FTP backup every second day of the week, lookup cronjobs for more info on setting dates and times.
# Don’t forget to substitue the path info to the script with your details
##### INSTALL COMPLETE #####
# DO NOT MODIFY ANYTHING BELOW #

host=`hostname`
cd $sourcedir

echo “Starting FTP Backup on ” $host

# Creating a local tar.gz Archive
tar cfvz $localdir/$1_`date +%y_%m_%d`.tar.gz $1

# Transfer the tar.gz Archive to remote server
if [ $2 == FTP ];then
cd $localdir
echo “user $serveruser $serverpass
cd $remotedir
bin
verbose
put $1_`date +%y_%m_%d`.tar.gz
” | ftp -i -n $serverip
fi

# Delete local tar.gz Archive again
if [ $3 == DEL ];then
rm $localdir/$1_`date +%y_%m_%d`.tar.gz
fi

echo “Ftp backup complete on ” $host
exit 0