Re: [Discuss] Network monitoring tool recommendation

2013-02-06 Thread Matt Shields
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 6:29 PM, David Rosenstrauch wrote:

> On 02/06/2013 02:00 PM, David Rosenstrauch wrote:
>
>> On 02/06/2013 12:34 PM, Matt Shields wrote:
>>
>>> Also try ntop.  Set it up on a standalone computer.  2 network ports, one
>>> for management, one where you mirror all your traffic at the
>>> switchport to
>>> it and have the interface in promiscuous mode.  Then it'll give you nice
>>> charts to show you who is talking to what (ie. User1 is streaming content
>>> from Youtube, etc).
>>>
>>> Matt
>>>
>>
>> Will check that out - thanks!
>>
>> DR
>>
>
> Great suggestion on ntop!  Looks like what I need.
>
>
> Just one thing I'm not sure about with it, though:
>
> It seems like the intention is that you would run ntop on your gateway
> machine (which all traffic on the network passes through) and that way get
> full stats for the entire network.
>
> However, that's not the setup I have.  I do have a gateway, but it's our
> firewall box, which I can't run ntop on.  The machine I am running it on is
> our ssh entrypoint into the network.  But the other machines on the network
> can initiate connections directly to the Internet through firewall without
> going through the ssh entrypoint.  So I'm thinking that by running ntop on
> the ssh entrypoint box, it's not going to actually be seeing all the
> incoming or outgoing traffic for the network, and so won't be able to
> report on it accurately.
>
> Am I right on this?  And if so, how best to work around this?  (Without
> having to run an instance of ntop on every machine in the network.)
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> DR
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>

I have a separate machine that I use for ntop, snort, tcpdump, nessus and
other monitoring tools.  It has 2 nics, one is management (ssh, http, etc)
and the second is set to promiscuous mode and connected to my core switch.
 On the core switch I have that port be a mirror of the main link.  So all
traffic in and out of the network is mirrored to my monitoring server where
I do analysis on what's going on.

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] Network monitoring tool recommendation

2013-02-06 Thread Rich Braun
David Rosenstrauch  asked:
> We've got some machine (or machines) sucking up a lot of bandwidth on
> our network.  I'm trying to pin down exactly what, but not having much
> luck so far.
>
> The network's got about a dozen machines

Check out munin, http://munin-monitoring.org.  You don't say which Linux
distro you're using, but most of the distros have packages for this (named
munin-node for client, munin for server).

The advantage of this tool vs. cacti or the others is that it's
self-configuring.  By default a lot of charts are already in place for you,
and the server doesn't need any configuration other than a list of nodes.  Set
up one machine with the server, set up munin-node client on all the others,
then you get a web page on the server with links to piles of graphs for each
client.

Learning curve for this is much shorter than most, if you're just trying to
solve a quick problem like this.

-rich


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Re: [Discuss] Network monitoring tool recommendation

2013-02-06 Thread David Rosenstrauch

On 02/06/2013 02:00 PM, David Rosenstrauch wrote:

On 02/06/2013 12:34 PM, Matt Shields wrote:

Also try ntop.  Set it up on a standalone computer.  2 network ports, one
for management, one where you mirror all your traffic at the
switchport to
it and have the interface in promiscuous mode.  Then it'll give you nice
charts to show you who is talking to what (ie. User1 is streaming content
from Youtube, etc).

Matt


Will check that out - thanks!

DR


Great suggestion on ntop!  Looks like what I need.


Just one thing I'm not sure about with it, though:

It seems like the intention is that you would run ntop on your gateway 
machine (which all traffic on the network passes through) and that way 
get full stats for the entire network.


However, that's not the setup I have.  I do have a gateway, but it's our 
firewall box, which I can't run ntop on.  The machine I am running it on 
is our ssh entrypoint into the network.  But the other machines on the 
network can initiate connections directly to the Internet through 
firewall without going through the ssh entrypoint.  So I'm thinking that 
by running ntop on the ssh entrypoint box, it's not going to actually be 
seeing all the incoming or outgoing traffic for the network, and so 
won't be able to report on it accurately.


Am I right on this?  And if so, how best to work around this?  (Without 
having to run an instance of ntop on every machine in the network.)


Thanks,

DR
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Re: [Discuss] Network monitoring tool recommendation

2013-02-06 Thread Alaric

I've had really good experience grabbing Nagios perf data as  graphing it with 
other tools.   I think the Splunk4Nagios app is a could example of how you 
could do it (https://github.com/skywalka/splunk-for-nagios)  you may not want 
to use Splunk due to cost, but I suspect the model would be pretty easily 
migrated to similar tools...  that being said, all that may be overkill, Cacti 
is pretty awesome at this sort of thing all by it's lonesome 

-a
  

On Feb 6, 2013, at 3:58 PM, Drew Van Zandt  wrote:

> https://www.google.com/search?q=nagios+plugin+network+byte+counter&oq=nagios+plugin+network+byte+counter
> 
> I haven't used any of them in ages (I'm back to hardware design, thank
> Science), but I had a plugin (or plugin + SNMP?) that monitored all the
> interface stats back when.
> 
> *
> Drew Van Zandt
> Cam # US2010035593 (M:Liam Hopkins R: Bastian Rotgeld)
> Domain Coordinator, MA-003-D.  Masquerade aVST
> *
> 
> 
> On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 1:59 PM, David Rosenstrauch wrote:
> 
>> ???  I use Nagios extensively on our system to monitor for uptime on
>> machines/daemons, and alert us when something breaks.  But I'm not aware of
>> it having the capability to show cumulative network usage, by remote host,
>> across a span of time, for every machine on a network.  If it does, could
>> you point me to which plugin one might use for that?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> DR
>> 
>> 
>> On 02/06/2013 12:21 PM, Drew Van Zandt wrote:
>> 
>>> Cacti, Nagios, and Intellipool are all solid for this.
>>> 
>>> *
>>> Drew Van Zandt
>>> Cam # US2010035593 (M:Liam Hopkins R: Bastian Rotgeld)
>>> Domain Coordinator, MA-003-D.  Masquerade aVST
>>> *
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 12:11 PM, David Rosenstrauch >>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> We've got some machine (or machines) sucking up a lot of bandwidth on our
 network.  I'm trying to pin down exactly what, but not having much luck
 so
 far.
 
 The network's got about a dozen machines, behind a firewall.  What I'd
 like to see is a high-level view of the whole network's bandwidth usage
 over the span of, say, 24 hours.  I.e., which machines are using the most
 bandwidth (i.e., in Gb), and connections to which external sites are
 causing most of the hogging.
 
 Clearly, micro-level tools like iftop aren't going to cut it here, as
 they
 only show me a) what's using bandwidth right now, and b) an individual
 machine basis.
 
 I tried running darkstat on each machine in the network, but it didn't
 really give me what I was looking for.  Again, the reporting was
 per-machine, and so didn't provide a comprehensive view.  (Among other
 problems.)
 
 Bandwidthd looks like it might have some promise, but would take some
 time
 to set up to give me a comprehensive view.  (I.e., configure a pgsql
 database.)
 
 
 Anyone have any particular recommendations for a situation like this?
 
 Thanks,
 
 DR
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> 
 
 
>>> 
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Re: [Discuss] Disk recovery utilities - dealing with deleted files

2013-02-06 Thread Jerry Feldman
On 02/04/2013 08:07 PM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote:
>> From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org [mailto:discuss-
>> bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org] On Behalf Of Rich Braun
>>
>> Lesson learned: obviously, I'm going to change that cron job to some sort of
>> sequestration method:  move the files someplace before this rsync, don't
>> ever
>> delete them until I manually confirm. (Anyone else have a script for that?
>> It'll be a bit hairy to write from scratch...)
> If the destination supports it, I would highly recommend rsnapshot.  Or 
> better yet, zfs.  ;-)  But seriously, given that you're currently using 
> rsync, there's a very good chance you can support rsnapshot, which is 
> rsync-based and works great.  (Albeit confusing to configure the first time.)
>
I use rsnapshot at home to back up my entire Linux system as well as the
BLU mail server. The nice thing about using an rsync-based system is
that you have a directory that is already in standard Linux format. What
rsnapshot brings to the table is incremental backups with full Linux
directory structures, using hard links to link duplicate files using the
--link-dest parameter. Back in the old days I used tar(1) but it picked
up an oversized file (a VM) and half of my archive was unavailable (this
was on a 32-bit system at the time).

Before big blue bought our company we used rsnapshot very successfully
to a very slow WD Mybook. While the backups would take forever, if I
ever needed to get a backed up file, it would take just a few minutes.
With many backup systems extracting a single file can be a real pain.

rsnapshot does have a few downsides. First you are keeping an entire
Linux directory uncompressed so space is an issue on larger systems,
secondly, if the backup fails you might have an incomplete archive.
Assuming you have multiple backup directories, you would still have the
previous archive, but on the next backup, the new directory will have
lost some of the hard links resulting in some duplicate files. Because
of the WD Mybook space and slowness, I would rename the partial
directory to a unique name to be deleted, and manually perform a
rollback, so the next backup would establish the hard links.

-- 
Jerry Feldman 
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id:3BC1EB90 
PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66  C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90


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Re: [Discuss] Network monitoring tool recommendation

2013-02-06 Thread Drew Van Zandt
https://www.google.com/search?q=nagios+plugin+network+byte+counter&oq=nagios+plugin+network+byte+counter

I haven't used any of them in ages (I'm back to hardware design, thank
Science), but I had a plugin (or plugin + SNMP?) that monitored all the
interface stats back when.

*
Drew Van Zandt
Cam # US2010035593 (M:Liam Hopkins R: Bastian Rotgeld)
Domain Coordinator, MA-003-D.  Masquerade aVST
*


On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 1:59 PM, David Rosenstrauch wrote:

> ???  I use Nagios extensively on our system to monitor for uptime on
> machines/daemons, and alert us when something breaks.  But I'm not aware of
> it having the capability to show cumulative network usage, by remote host,
> across a span of time, for every machine on a network.  If it does, could
> you point me to which plugin one might use for that?
>
> Thanks,
>
> DR
>
>
> On 02/06/2013 12:21 PM, Drew Van Zandt wrote:
>
>> Cacti, Nagios, and Intellipool are all solid for this.
>>
>> *
>> Drew Van Zandt
>> Cam # US2010035593 (M:Liam Hopkins R: Bastian Rotgeld)
>> Domain Coordinator, MA-003-D.  Masquerade aVST
>> *
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 12:11 PM, David Rosenstrauch > >wrote:
>>
>>  We've got some machine (or machines) sucking up a lot of bandwidth on our
>>> network.  I'm trying to pin down exactly what, but not having much luck
>>> so
>>> far.
>>>
>>> The network's got about a dozen machines, behind a firewall.  What I'd
>>> like to see is a high-level view of the whole network's bandwidth usage
>>> over the span of, say, 24 hours.  I.e., which machines are using the most
>>> bandwidth (i.e., in Gb), and connections to which external sites are
>>> causing most of the hogging.
>>>
>>> Clearly, micro-level tools like iftop aren't going to cut it here, as
>>> they
>>> only show me a) what's using bandwidth right now, and b) an individual
>>> machine basis.
>>>
>>> I tried running darkstat on each machine in the network, but it didn't
>>> really give me what I was looking for.  Again, the reporting was
>>> per-machine, and so didn't provide a comprehensive view.  (Among other
>>> problems.)
>>>
>>> Bandwidthd looks like it might have some promise, but would take some
>>> time
>>> to set up to give me a comprehensive view.  (I.e., configure a pgsql
>>> database.)
>>>
>>>
>>> Anyone have any particular recommendations for a situation like this?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> DR
>>> ___
>>> Discuss mailing list
>>> Discuss@blu.org
>>> http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>> 
>>> >
>>>
>>>
>>
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Re: [Discuss] Network monitoring tool recommendation

2013-02-06 Thread David Rosenstrauch

On 02/06/2013 12:34 PM, Matt Shields wrote:

Also try ntop.  Set it up on a standalone computer.  2 network ports, one
for management, one where you mirror all your traffic at the switchport to
it and have the interface in promiscuous mode.  Then it'll give you nice
charts to show you who is talking to what (ie. User1 is streaming content
from Youtube, etc).

Matt


Will check that out - thanks!

DR

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Re: [Discuss] Network monitoring tool recommendation

2013-02-06 Thread David Rosenstrauch
???  I use Nagios extensively on our system to monitor for uptime on 
machines/daemons, and alert us when something breaks.  But I'm not aware 
of it having the capability to show cumulative network usage, by remote 
host, across a span of time, for every machine on a network.  If it 
does, could you point me to which plugin one might use for that?


Thanks,

DR

On 02/06/2013 12:21 PM, Drew Van Zandt wrote:

Cacti, Nagios, and Intellipool are all solid for this.

*
Drew Van Zandt
Cam # US2010035593 (M:Liam Hopkins R: Bastian Rotgeld)
Domain Coordinator, MA-003-D.  Masquerade aVST
*


On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 12:11 PM, David Rosenstrauch wrote:


We've got some machine (or machines) sucking up a lot of bandwidth on our
network.  I'm trying to pin down exactly what, but not having much luck so
far.

The network's got about a dozen machines, behind a firewall.  What I'd
like to see is a high-level view of the whole network's bandwidth usage
over the span of, say, 24 hours.  I.e., which machines are using the most
bandwidth (i.e., in Gb), and connections to which external sites are
causing most of the hogging.

Clearly, micro-level tools like iftop aren't going to cut it here, as they
only show me a) what's using bandwidth right now, and b) an individual
machine basis.

I tried running darkstat on each machine in the network, but it didn't
really give me what I was looking for.  Again, the reporting was
per-machine, and so didn't provide a comprehensive view.  (Among other
problems.)

Bandwidthd looks like it might have some promise, but would take some time
to set up to give me a comprehensive view.  (I.e., configure a pgsql
database.)


Anyone have any particular recommendations for a situation like this?

Thanks,

DR
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Re: [Discuss] Network monitoring tool recommendation

2013-02-06 Thread Matt Shields
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 12:21 PM, Drew Van Zandt wrote:

> Cacti, Nagios, and Intellipool are all solid for this.
>
> *
> Drew Van Zandt
> Cam # US2010035593 (M:Liam Hopkins R: Bastian Rotgeld)
> Domain Coordinator, MA-003-D.  Masquerade aVST
> *
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 12:11 PM, David Rosenstrauch  >wrote:
>
> > We've got some machine (or machines) sucking up a lot of bandwidth on our
> > network.  I'm trying to pin down exactly what, but not having much luck
> so
> > far.
> >
> > The network's got about a dozen machines, behind a firewall.  What I'd
> > like to see is a high-level view of the whole network's bandwidth usage
> > over the span of, say, 24 hours.  I.e., which machines are using the most
> > bandwidth (i.e., in Gb), and connections to which external sites are
> > causing most of the hogging.
> >
> > Clearly, micro-level tools like iftop aren't going to cut it here, as
> they
> > only show me a) what's using bandwidth right now, and b) an individual
> > machine basis.
> >
> > I tried running darkstat on each machine in the network, but it didn't
> > really give me what I was looking for.  Again, the reporting was
> > per-machine, and so didn't provide a comprehensive view.  (Among other
> > problems.)
> >
> > Bandwidthd looks like it might have some promise, but would take some
> time
> > to set up to give me a comprehensive view.  (I.e., configure a pgsql
> > database.)
> >
> >
> > Anyone have any particular recommendations for a situation like this?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > DR
>

Also try ntop.  Set it up on a standalone computer.  2 network ports, one
for management, one where you mirror all your traffic at the switchport to
it and have the interface in promiscuous mode.  Then it'll give you nice
charts to show you who is talking to what (ie. User1 is streaming content
from Youtube, etc).

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] Network monitoring tool recommendation

2013-02-06 Thread Drew Van Zandt
Cacti, Nagios, and Intellipool are all solid for this.

*
Drew Van Zandt
Cam # US2010035593 (M:Liam Hopkins R: Bastian Rotgeld)
Domain Coordinator, MA-003-D.  Masquerade aVST
*


On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 12:11 PM, David Rosenstrauch wrote:

> We've got some machine (or machines) sucking up a lot of bandwidth on our
> network.  I'm trying to pin down exactly what, but not having much luck so
> far.
>
> The network's got about a dozen machines, behind a firewall.  What I'd
> like to see is a high-level view of the whole network's bandwidth usage
> over the span of, say, 24 hours.  I.e., which machines are using the most
> bandwidth (i.e., in Gb), and connections to which external sites are
> causing most of the hogging.
>
> Clearly, micro-level tools like iftop aren't going to cut it here, as they
> only show me a) what's using bandwidth right now, and b) an individual
> machine basis.
>
> I tried running darkstat on each machine in the network, but it didn't
> really give me what I was looking for.  Again, the reporting was
> per-machine, and so didn't provide a comprehensive view.  (Among other
> problems.)
>
> Bandwidthd looks like it might have some promise, but would take some time
> to set up to give me a comprehensive view.  (I.e., configure a pgsql
> database.)
>
>
> Anyone have any particular recommendations for a situation like this?
>
> Thanks,
>
> DR
> __**_
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss@blu.org
> http://lists.blu.org/mailman/**listinfo/discuss
>
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[Discuss] Network monitoring tool recommendation

2013-02-06 Thread David Rosenstrauch
We've got some machine (or machines) sucking up a lot of bandwidth on 
our network.  I'm trying to pin down exactly what, but not having much 
luck so far.


The network's got about a dozen machines, behind a firewall.  What I'd 
like to see is a high-level view of the whole network's bandwidth usage 
over the span of, say, 24 hours.  I.e., which machines are using the 
most bandwidth (i.e., in Gb), and connections to which external sites 
are causing most of the hogging.


Clearly, micro-level tools like iftop aren't going to cut it here, as 
they only show me a) what's using bandwidth right now, and b) an 
individual machine basis.


I tried running darkstat on each machine in the network, but it didn't 
really give me what I was looking for.  Again, the reporting was 
per-machine, and so didn't provide a comprehensive view.  (Among other 
problems.)


Bandwidthd looks like it might have some promise, but would take some 
time to set up to give me a comprehensive view.  (I.e., configure a 
pgsql database.)



Anyone have any particular recommendations for a situation like this?

Thanks,

DR
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[Discuss] [Position-available] Senior Linux Systems Administrator/DevOps

2013-02-06 Thread Joe St. Louis
Thompson Technologies is seeking a Senior Linux Systems Administrator for a 
DevOps position with our client, an online IT media related firm, in Newton, 
MA. The person in this position should have at least 4 years of experience 
working as a Linux System Administrator (RedHat/SuSE) and have a strong 
background working with virtualization technologies (VMware preferred).

Required:

 *   4+ Years of experience with administration of RedHat/SuSE Enterprise Linux 
in a production environment
 *   Experience using VMware to manage virtual servers
 *   Must be able to provide documentation for all systems
 *   Maintaining infrastructure to ensure 100% availability
 *   Strong knowledge of virtualization concepts overall
 *   Strong experience with debugging
 *   Strong knowledge of Apache configurations
 *   Solid experience with data backups
 *   Experience with Storage technologies (EMC or others) and MySQL is not 
required but highly desired.
 *   Experience with Tomcat or WebLogic is also a plus
This is a direct hire (FTE) position.  Salary is based on previous experience.

For immediate consideration, please send resumes to:
Joe St. Louis
Technical Recruiter
Thompson Technologies, Inc.
jstlo...@thompsontechnologies.com

Thompson Technologies has been named several times as one of the 
fastest-growing companies in the country by Inc. 500. We have recently been 
selected as one of Atlanta 's 50 fastest growing companies by the Atlanta 
Business Chronicle! Our growth is due mainly to a partnering approach with our 
Clients. We are focused on making our Clients successful, and we do it with 
honesty and integrity.
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[Discuss] Summary of data-protection

2013-02-06 Thread Rich Braun
Derek Atkins wrote:
> Sounds like you want RAID1..

RAID is already underlying all of this, and it's there to make disk hardware
swaps painless.  This thread is mainly about the steps needed to protect
ourselves from our own occasional mistakes.  I'll summarize some thoughts:

1) Set up a backup system that includes three copies of every file, made as
soon as practical after any new files are added or old ones changed.  The
first copy should be transferred on-site, without delay.  The second copy
should be made to a remote location such as a backup service, perhaps with a
polling interval of 15 minutes to 24 hours.  The third copy should be kept
totally offline at a protected location.  (Optional:  keep more copies going
back a year or 5 years so you can revert to earlier versions.)

2) When doing system upgrades/maintenance, it will occasionally be tempting to
make seemingly-harmless changes to your software, scripts, or physical disks. 
But before wiping any data to implement one of those "harmless" change, ask
yourself:  do I have *3* extra copies of *every* file I'm now putting at risk?

3) There will be inevitable periods when you've made an exception to item #1,
mainly due to time/money constraints:  didn't have time to do the offline
backup, the software failed, there's more data than there used to be, etc. 
Accept that reality and *do* something about it before any disruptive work.

4) Use at least two different varieties of software to make your backups.  (In
my case I use CrashPlan's software for the first two varieties of backup, and
rsync for the offline ones, but I think I need a replacement for CrashPlan,
and improvements to the way I use rsync because it doesn't include any good
sequestration mechanism to use in place of '--delete'.  Perhaps toss it in
favor of rsnapshot, perhaps unison, perhaps bacula.)

5) Know what's in your backups:  keep a near-line copy of a listing of the
filenames, modification timestamps, and md5/sha1/whatever checksums.

6) Test the backups at least annually, and again before any disruptive change.
 (This is where I really want to see better scripts from software authors:
something I can stick in my local nagios to test the backups every 3 minutes
instead of whenever I need to do a restore...)

7) Understand your use cases and pick filesystem types (jfs, ext3, xfs, btrfs,
ext4, zfs) according to your own performance and data-protection requirements.
 The one with the most data-recovery tools out there is ext3, I believe; its
main performance limitation lies in file-deletion (reclaiming space from a
10GB+ file takes a lot longer on ext3 than ext4), which you probably don't
care about but it's your system, think about these things and make informed
decisions.  There *will* come a time when you wished undelete were available &
easy.

8) I've always been singing the praises of RAID but if you use it, monitor it.
Make sure you have an alert system set up to tell you within minutes of any
drive going offline.

9) One thing I'm not yet doing but should is monitoring free space for sudden
/increases/ of available space.  And arguably I should set up a tripwire for
long-term storage:  if you're keeping terabytes of permanent files, you don't
want to discover a pile of them missing months or years after a loss, very
likely after you've rotated through and wiped all the older save sets.  These
would be simple-to-craft scripts but I don't see them as part of any existing
backup software suites; it's one of those someday-I'll-get-to-it weekend
projects.

10) You could punt all of this to The Cloud but use at least two different
services, probably three.  Customer service at these companies is usually poor
and you care a lot more about your data than they do.

My $.02.

-rich


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Re: [Discuss] Ext4, ugh! Re: Disk recovery utilities - dealing with deleted files

2013-02-06 Thread Rich Pieri
On Wed, 06 Feb 2013 09:41:39 -0500
Derek Atkins  wrote:

> Sounds like you want RAID1..

NO.

NO.

NO.

A THOUSAND TIMES, NO!

RAID provides no data integrity. None. Zilch. Zero. Nada.

Given two mirrored disks A and B. If you accidentally run a recursive
delete like Rich did then your data is gone. RAID will not let you
recover the deleted data.

If a controller goes stupid or glitches during a write then at least
one disk will have garbage data on it. RAID will not protect you from
this.

If a RAID rebuild uses that garbage data as the mirror "master" then you
will really loose all of your data. To the contrary of your assertion,
RAID will blindly and silently and automatically destroy your data.

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Rich P.
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Re: [Discuss] Free Mail Server

2013-02-06 Thread Rich Pieri
On Wed, 06 Feb 2013 06:35:28 -0500
Mark Woodward  wrote:

> Does anyone know of a free SMTP server that isn't in a black hole?

smtp.googlemail.com is what I typically use.

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Re: [Discuss] Free Mail Server

2013-02-06 Thread Derek Atkins
Mark Woodward  writes:

> Does anyone know of a free SMTP server that isn't in a black hole?

If you have a gmail account I believe you can use google's SMTP server.

-derek

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Re: [Discuss] Ext4, ugh! Re: Disk recovery utilities - dealing with deleted files

2013-02-06 Thread Derek Atkins
"Rich Braun"  writes:

> Edward Ned Harvey (blu) stated:
>>> Well, ext4 performs so much better.  If the only risk is the lack of
>>> availability of undelete tools, then I say, the better solution is to use
>>> ext4 and backups.
>
> Jack echoed:
>> Ed, that seems like a better approach for most uses.
>
> But think about my use case:  something like 95% of my data volume consists of
> videos, be they ISOs of my DVD collection, stuff recorded off the air, or
> home-video recordings.
>
> I care a whole LOT more about maintaining data integrity than I do about
> performance.  The only performance I really need is the ability to stream the
> videos on demand, and the systems are 10x more powerful than that.

Sounds like you want RAID1..

-derek

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   Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
   Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
   URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/PP-ASEL-IA N1NWH
   warl...@mit.eduPGP key available
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Re: [Discuss] Free Mail Server

2013-02-06 Thread Edward Ned Harvey (blu)
> From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org [mailto:discuss-
> bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org] On Behalf Of Mark Woodward
> 
> Does anyone know of a free SMTP server that isn't in a black hole?

You're hoping to find an open relay on the internet, that's free, secure, and 
reliable?  Good luck.

If you have a domain with google apps, then smtp.gmail.com.  If you have an 
account with o365, then you can add a free mailuser (not mailbox).  If you have 
any server that you administer, just run your own.

If you're new to amazon aws, they have a free tier.  You can host a micro 
instance for a year and host your own.  (But initially, your IP is likely to be 
in a blackhole, so you'll have to clean it up once.)

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Re: [Discuss] Free Mail Server

2013-02-06 Thread Dan Ritter
On Wed, Feb 06, 2013 at 06:35:28AM -0500, Mark Woodward wrote:
> Does anyone know of a free SMTP server that isn't in a black hole?

No.

However, you can use fastmail.fm's basic service for $4.95/year,
and they're pretty reliable.

pobox.com is also reliable, but runs $20/year.

-dsr-



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[Discuss] Free Mail Server

2013-02-06 Thread Mark Woodward

Does anyone know of a free SMTP server that isn't in a black hole?
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