Most of us don’t have native IPv6 Internet connections at home. Fortunately, it’s easy (and free) to get connected to the IPv6 Internet. Here’s how to get your FreeBSD box connected.
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I spent some time thinking about backup strategy, and I decided for my purposes, I’d like to handle the staging process (getting all the files put together), and I’d like the backup solution itself to simply upload the files – but since I want to do nightly backups, I’d like the backup solution to have incremental capabilities.
I narrowed it down to two possible solutions – Tarsnap and Duplicity. Both support incremental backups, both are command-line capable. I decided to use Duplicity because it uploads directly to whichever back-end service you use – be it Amazon S3 or an SFTP server . Tarsnap uses S3, but that’s your only option, and they do some processing for you, and because of that, it costs more.
Now, on to the details.
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The FreeBSD console is colorless by default – but most terminals and SSH clients these days support color. The benefits of colorizing your console should be pretty obvious. It makes your life a little easier – you don’t have to do as much mental processing.
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The Duke URLGrabber package for Python makes it incredibly easy to retrieve files from remote servers, and it abstracts urllib2 for you in a protocol-independent way, so you can focus on your application instead of spending time working with Python’s built-in urllib2.
On Windows and Mac OSX, by default, urllib2 (and therefore URLGrabber) will use the built-in proxy settings of the system – but sometimes you don’t want that. For example, let’s say you’re using a Windows box that’s on a domain, and proxy settings have been pushed down by group policy. You want to access local network resources without needing to route through the proxy or authenticate to it.
With urllib2, you would simply add code like the following:
proxy_support = urllib2.ProxyHandler({})
Note the empty dictionary “{}” to specify no proxies. Doing the same for URLGrabber was suggested on a mailing list post – and it apparently worked for the poster. However, I wasn’t able to get it to work, so I came up with another way. I just specified a dummy proxy for a dummy protocol, as follows:
kwargs["proxies"] = { 'nothing': 'http://nothing' }
Have fun!
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Whether you’re using FreeBSD for your workstation, a simple home server, or in a complex IT environment where reliability is critical, losing the data on your hard disk(s) is probably the worst type of failure you can have. I’ve already gone over a backup strategy for FreeBSD, but it’s best to try to prevent data loss before it happens.
As it turns out, pretty much all modern hard disks have built-in SMART technology (SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). It can alert you before many types of problems will occur, and hopefully provide you with enough time to get your data off the drive safely, before catastrophic failure occurs.
It’s pretty easy to take advantage of this technology on FreeBSD with a package called Smartmontools.
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