Clonezilla for PC Backups

One of the reasons I wanted to get our XRAIDs up and running is to use them as storage space for backup images of our lab PCs. Since we use the lab PCs to test all manner of programs, and since Windows tends to develop bit rot over time, the PCs periodically need to be wiped and rebuilt. Doing this manually is tedious, to put it mildly.

With a big, network accessible storage space, I can build up a PC, get it into good working order, then create an image of the hard drive and save it on the XRAID. Then, the next time I need to rebuild that particular box I just wipe the drive and reapply the image.

Using disk images to backup PCs is of course nothing new. Several commercial products can do this, e.g., Symatec Ghost. However, we only have one license for Ghost even though we have over ten lab PCs. Open source to the rescure.

I recently downloaded Clonezilla , which is based on a live version of Debian Linux. I used Clonezilla to create a compressed hard disk image of one of my lap PCs, a Dell Latitude D600. The image was saved via SCP to a network accessible directory on the XRAID.

To test the restore function, I then reformatted the Dell's hard disk using GParted, running on a System Rescue CD , another bootable Linux distro. Next, I booted the PC using the Clonezilla CD and did a restore.

It appears to have worked perfectly, restoring my XP Pro partition, Debian partition, and the MBR.

Aside from PCs, Clonezilla's web page indicates that it supports Intel Macs.  I plan to test this using our department's MacBook.  Assuming that it works on the Mac platform I'll also create an image of Rohan, my MacBook Pro.

This is going to make my life easier.

ZOMG!

How I spent last Saturday:



I put up some of my own pics here , and a couple of crappy low-resolution videos taken with my Blackberry here .

Langhorne Rod and Gun Club put on yet another fun and safe shoot.

Remington Responds on H-S Precision

Remington uses a lot of H-S Precision stocks in build some variants of their Model 700 rifle.  Over at The War on Guns, David Codrea has a response from Remington's CEO, Tommy Milner .

Remington did the right thing when faced with Jim Zumbo so I'm optimistic they'll do the right thing regarding H-S Precision.

HS Precision Gets Endorsement by Lon Horiuchi

{Via AR15.com.)

This should be enough to make every freedom loving American vomit.  HS Precision, manufacturer of stocks and other parts for precsion rifles, is featuring an endorsement of their products by Lon Horiuchi on the back of their catalog.  Here's a scan (click on the thumbnail for a full size image):

For readers unfamiliar with Horiuchi, he is the FBI sniper who shot Vicki Weaver during the the standoff at Ruby Ridge 1992.  He was also present at the 1993 Waco siege where he was again suspected of misconduct.  He charged with manslaughter for Weaver's death but the charge was eventually dismissed in a Federal court, the basis for which was the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.  (Note that this ruling doesn't go to the merits of the case.)  In gun owner circles, he is regarded as a murderer.

As pointed out by Arfcommer "dedfella," this is akin to having a fertilizer company get an endorsement by Timothy McVeigh.  Poor taste, putting it mildly.

The owners of HS Precision would have to be living under a rock to not understand the revulsion this would incite among gunnies.  Obviously, they don't give a shit about us and are only concerned with securing .gov contracts.  Screw 'em.

Edit: If you click on the link at the top of this thread, a couple of AR15.com members have spoken with people at HS Precision and confirmed this.


Edit 11/27/08: Well, this post has certainly attracted a lot more visitors than normal.  Welcome, and please poke around my site.  If you're interested in the subject matter of this post there's a lot more shooting and RKBA content.

Weekend Update

Saturday morning I went over to my MIL's condo to work on her old XP PC.  I built it for her a few years ago using one of the PCs Wal-Mart was selling w/o an OS.  I give it a tuneup about once a year and generally it's been OK for her light use.  However, recently it became unusable.

The box has a 900 MHz Duron CPU and 256 MB of RAM.  Not bad for when I built it but obviously considered slow by current standards.  Anyway, I saw that she'd let Windows Update install IE7.  Even though she uses Firefox, just having IE7 on it caused the machine to slow to a crawl.  I uninstalled it, cleaned up the registry and got rid of a lot of junk with Crap Cleaner, and got it to the point where it's usable.

The other problem she'll have soon is lack of disk space.  The box has a 10 GB drive with only a couple gig free.

At this point I don't feel that it's cost effective to sink any money into the PC.  I'm considering getting her a cheap laptop, possible a refurbished Dell Latitude from somewhere like eCost.com, and moving her over to that.  One nice thing about a laptop would be that instead of me having to schelp to her condo if it needs attention, she can bring it to me.  We'll see.

Yesterday I was able to get out to the range for a couple of hours.  I ran about 80 rounds of .45 ACP through my Springfield M1911 without a bobble.  I'm confident now that the functioning issues I had a little while ago were magazine-induced.  The last time I had the gun out I identified the bad mag and junked it.  I currently have one 7 round Springfield factory mag, four Chip McCormick 8 round Shooting Star mags, and two 10 round CMC Power-Mags.  (I generally use the latter in my Marlin Camp Carbine because I don't like how the pistol feels with the extra-capacity magazine.)  I need to pick up some more of the 8 round Shooting Stars.

After using up all my .45 ACP I went to the 75 yard range and put about 40 rounds through my 1944 Fazakerly No.4 Mk.I Lee-Enfield.  I bought this rifle back around 1985 or '86 and shot it quite a bit through the early '90s.  I haven't shot it much lately and decided it would be fun to give it a workout.  Watching some videos of Lee-Enfield rapid fire on Youtube whetted my appetite.  E.g., this one .

The .303 I show was a mix of my last 3 rounds of HXP Greek surplus, some Sellier & Bellot, and some 1981 Winchester.  It wasn't a problem to keep all my shots inside the black of an SR-1 target from 75 yards, from the bench, shooting pretty rapidly.  I was able to hold the 10 ring if I shot slow fire.  I used to be able to keep them all in the black from 100 yards offhand, slow fire, but I'm out of practice.  Need to fix that.

Cabela's Trip

This morning we all piled into the Expedition and went to Cabela's in Hamburg, PA.  I figured the girls would really like the various mounted animals and the aquariums, and I wasn't disappointed.

Not surprisingly for this time of year, the store was mobbed.  This in spite of the current down economy.  The crowd in the gun section was especially heavy, stacked two deep in front of the gun counter.  I expected this in light of last week's election results.  I restrained myself and only bought a bulk pack of 525 rounds of Federal .22 LR ammo for $14.99 and a large spray can of RemOil.  (I've come to like RemOil as a cleaner, but IMO it's too light for general lube or anti-corrosion protection.  It's especially handy for hosing out the innards of a dirty AR-15, and the smell isn't bad.)

Aside from the ammo and oil, we got the girls stuffed horses, Judith got some clothes, and I got a new cap to replace one I lost a couple weeks ago.

While there we had lunch.  I can recommend the venison bratwurst.  Yum.

Range Report

Dad and I made it out to the range today for a couple of hours.  Dad had his Colt AR-15A3 while I brought my Savage 93GL in .22 WMR, 1944 Underwood M1 Carbine, and my Marlin 336 in .30-30.

Dad was shooting mostly Wolf 55 grain .223 today in his AR-15 and experienced a couple failures of the action to stay open on the last shot with it.  He also ran some Radway Green SS109 loads through it with no problems.  He probably has less than 500 rounds through the gun so it's not broken in yet.  I suggested that he stick with the hotter milspec ammo for another couple hundred rounds, after which time it should run better with the Wolf ammo, which is not as hot as American .223/5.56mm.

This was the first time shooting the Savage 93GL since I put a Nikon 4x32mm Prostaff rimfire scope on it.  I did my initial zero using some Winchester Dynapoints I picked up over the summer at Wal-Mart.  I've read that they are a bit less destructive on game than most .22 WMR JHPs so I wanted to give them a try.  Accuracy with the Winchesters was good -- well under an inch at 50 yards -- but I had two rounds in one box of 50 which required a second strike on a different part of the rim to go off.  Very dissappointing.

I also shot some CCI Maxi Mag JHPs through the Savage to confirm the zero, since this is my normal .22 WMR load of choice.  I had my first ever dud with CCI rimfire ammo today.  One round failed to fire even after being hit on three different places on the rim.  {grumble}

This was also the first time shooting the Savage after installing a Rifle Basix sear.  My rifle was made before Savage put Accu-Triggers on their rimfire bolt actions.  The factory trigger was heavy and had a lot of creep.  With the Rifle Basix sear most of the creep is gone and it breaks at about 2.5 lbs, greatly improving shootability.

I only put about 30 or 40 rounds of Remington UMC FMJ through the M1, but experienced no malfunctions.  As expected it shot a little high at 50 yards but I kept all shots in about 2 or 3 inches, typical for an M1 Carbine in my experience.  This Carbine was one of the batch imported from Israel last year.  It has a fair amount of surface character but the bore is excellent.  The recoil seemed a just little brisk for an M1 so I think the recoil spring may need to be replaced with one from Wolff Gunsprings.

Debian Linux

One of the projects with which I'm involved at work requires me to determine how much bandwidth a streaming IP video product is consuming.  To do so I wanted to run ntop, a protocol analyzer which can present data in nice pretty graphs (important for showing to PHBs).

I've used ntop off and on in the past but one thing that's always been a PITA is installing it.  I first tried installing it on my CentOS 5.2 box but ran into dependency hell.  Next I tried on my Dell Latituded D600, which was a dual-boot XP Pro and OpenSUSE 11 box.  No dice, YAST couldn't find it or rrdtool (a dependency) in the OpenSUSE repositories.  So, I decided to give Debian a try.

I haven't tried plain Debian in years, though I've used derivatives, such as Knoppix and (K)Ubuntu recently.  I am pretty impressed.

To install Debian I downloaded and burned the netinstall image to a DVD (it'll fit on a CD but I didn't have any handy).  The installer recognized all the hardware in my Dell and didn't screw up my XP installation, either.

To get my Intel Pro2200BG wifi NIC running, I had to download firmware, but basic support was already in the 2.6 kernel I'm running.  I'm on an open network and haven't yet tried it on a network with encryption.

Aside from ntop I installed some other network monitoring tools, including nmap, Wireshar, and airsnort, all from Debian's repositories.

So far, so good.  I wish I had tried Debian years ago.

Post Election Thought

After watching the results last night this is the first thing that came to mind:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

--Thomas Paine, Crisis In America I.

And then this:

[N]ever give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

--Sir Winston Churchill, October 29, 1941, Harrow School.

Voted This Morning

This morning I arrived at my polling place about 7:10 and had a ten minute wait.  By the time I left the line went out the door.  In the two decades I've been voting at this place, I've never seen such a line.

It's going to be a nail-biter.

Obama Exposed

One last pre-election bump for my other blog, Obama Exposed.  If you haven't checked it out in awhile please take a look.

McCain/Palin '08!

Apple Store Visit

Yesterday I went over to the Apple Store in King of Prussia, PA with a friend, mainly to check out the new MacBooks and MB Pros.  The new machines are nice, though IMHO the deletion of the FireWire 400 port from the MacBooks was a mistake.  I also would like to see two FireWire ports on the MacBook Pros (Rohan, my almost two year-old MBP has FW 800 and FW 400 ports).  The MBs have two USB 2.0 ports but IME, FW400 provides better sustained throughput than the supposedly faster USB 2.0.

The new trackpads are nice and address one problem (IMHO) that Apple needed to.  Namely, the lack of a two button mouse.  The entire trackpad acts like a mouse button, even down to the click.  But if you go into System Preferences > Trackpad, you can configure either the lower left or right corner as a secondary mouse button.  Voila, you now have a two button mouse.  Sweet.

The other reason for taking a trip to the KoP store was to get a new power supply for my wife's G4 iBook.  The iBook was issued to her by the School District of Philadelphia about 2.5 - 3 years ago and it's been great.  A few days ago she noticed it wasn't charging and Friday night, I discovered that this was because the cord was frayed near where it plugs into the iBook.  It was delivering enough juice to slowly charge the machine when it was off, but not nearly enough when the box was powered on.  Worse, it's a fire hazard.

Luckily, I was able to use the power supply from the G4 iBook I used as my primary machine before buying Rohan.  That box gets occasional use by my daughters, and the Apple power supply design could be more robust, so I didn't want to share it between the two iBooks.

Unfortunately, the school district is strapped for cash and the odds of getting a replacement power supply through it are about nil, so I reluctantly coughed up the cash for a new one.  If and when Judith has to return the iBook to the school district, I'll keep the new power supply as a spare.

OS X Server

I've spent the past couple days at work setting up one of the two Apple XServs that we received last month.  So far, I'm liking the GUI admin tools included with Leopard Server, though I am also doing some tweaking via the command line accessed via ssh.  Also, to add some flexibility, I installed X11 and the XCode Developer Tools.  For one thing, I need gcc.

Specifically, I want to run Cacti on the box to provide SNMP monitoring of devices in our lab network, e.g., routers, switches, and CMTSes.  Cacti is basically a graphical front end to RRDTools, providing a web interface using PHP.  I installed MacPorts to simplify installing Cacti and its dependencies.  Unfortunately, the MacPorts install of net-snmp bombed so I wound up installing it by hand.  (This wasn't a big surprise.  I've had ports fail to install using MacPorts before on other boxes.)  With net-snmp installed I was able to get RRDTool installed, including the MySQL dependency.  Being an MySQL n00b, I'm working my way through getting that configured.

Aside from the Xserv providing network management and monitoring, I'm using it as a web server to provide a portal for our lab management group.  The initial version of the portal is based on a simple, static HTML page with links to forms and informtational documents.

However, OS X.5 Server includes a wiki server to build workgroup intranets.  I've managed to create a pretty decent looking wiki for our group.  I still need to figure out how to enable read-only access for people not in our group, so they can view our procedures and download forms.  The default workgroup wiki settings require users to authenticate before they can view the pages we create.

Future services on the box will also include file sharing, once I get an XRAID connected.

New Blackberry Curve

My employer issues me a Blackberry 8330 Curve since I am one of the floor captains in our building.  We have an unlimited data plan and I've never gotten any complaints about using it to surf the web outside of normal business hours, though I didn't feel comfortable putting my personal email accounts on the device.  It does have a few disadvantages, though:

1. The camera is disabled for security purposes.  Nevermind the fact that plenty of personally owned camera phones are allowed in the building.
2. Tethering is disabled, so I can't use it to get my laptop online.  Even if tethering was enabled, T-Mobile just lit up their 3G network in Philly and my device supports only their EDGE network, which is much slower.
   
3. Our carrier is T-Mobile.  We used to have Sprint, who has decent service in the Philadelphia area.  T-Mobile's network coverage is much spottier.

Last week I became eligible for Verizon's "New Every 2" promotion on my personal cell phone.  This is a promo wherein they give you $49.99 credit towards a new phone every two years.  Verizon also has the best cell network in this area, IMHO.

So, yesterday I went to the local Verizon store and bought a Blackberry Curve 8330 pretty much the same as the T-Mobile one from work.  Aside from the $49.99 credit, there's also a $79.99 mail-in rebate, so the final cost of the phone, belt case, car charger, and a 2 GB Micro SD card will be only $100.

The T-Mobile phone is configured to use wifi connections when available.  The Verizon Blackberry doesn't have that capability, but it doesn't really need it due to Verizon's better network coverage.

My employer has a deal worked out with Verizon for a 20% discount on cell phone plans, including data plans.  So I got the 5 GB/month data plan and the $15/month tethering plan, with the first month's tethering free.

Since my laptop is a MacBook Pro I specifically asked about Mac support tethering and syncronization.  The Verizonbot told that both are supported but that I'd need to download the PocketMac sync tool from Blackberry.com.  The tethering software would be included on the CD in the phone box.

Nope.

After inserting the CD and finding Windows-only tethering software, I hit Google.  I found two ways to tether the Blackberry to Rohan:

1. Via Bluetooth, which requires no additional software.
2. Via USB, which required me to download Verizon's connection manager software for one of their EVDO cards.

This was a PITA, to put it mildly.  Although I was able to get tethering up and running pretty quickly, a non-technical Mac user would have been in a real bind.  Is it really that hard for Verizon to include at least the tethering app on the Blackberry CD?

Oh well, bitching aside, I'm able to get about a meg down using the USB connection to Verizon's EVDO network.  Bluetooth speeds are about half that.  Web browsing speeds using Opera Mini are better than the T-Mobile Blackberry.  Accessing my Gmail account, using Google's downloadable app, works much more smoothly.  So far I've made only a couple phone calls but call quality was better than my old Motorola Razr.

The Gun Show Loophole

Clayton Cramer comments on the so-called "gun show loophole:"

Most gun owners know that there is no loophole. Federal law does not currently prohibit two private parties transferring a firearm. Some states have laws about this, but the federal government does not. There is no more a gun show "loophole" than there is a newspaper advertisement "loophole" because newspapers accept ads for guns for sale.

As Clayton details, there is no correlation between gun shows and increased crime.

Red Hat Training

The Red Hat Linux training class I took this week wrapped up early on Friday, allowing me to leave and work from home the rest of the day.  I'm currently on the back porch with Rohan, a glass of water (booze will wait for later), and an H. Uppman Vintage Cameroon cigar.  May as well take advantage of a beautiful Fall day, before they're gone.  ;-)

Overall the class -- Guru Labs GL250 Enterprise Linux System Administration was pretty good.  It could have been a bit more organized the first day or two.  E.g., the server in room needed the full Fedora Core 6 repository setup but otherwise it went well.

The exercises in our lab book were geared towards Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or Fedora Core 6.  This was my first time working with FC and it seems decent (I am aware that FC9 is the current release).

I'm considering going for RHCT and maybe RHCE certification.  I figure with the current state of the economy the more certs I have the better.  That means I'll need to setup a lab here at the house.  What I may do is rebuild Bagend -- currently sitting sans hard disk -- with additional RAM and a bigger disk than I had in it, loading CentOS 5.2, and installing a couple of different virtual Linux boxes under VirtualBox.  Earlier this week I did setup FC6 in VirtualBox on Rohan but for the purposes of lab exercises more machines would be beneficial.  Since I have limited physical space virtualized servers makes the most sense for me.

Bagend, which I build back in the Fall of 2004, currently has 1 GB of RAM, an AlthonXP at around 2 GHz, and had an 80 GB disk in it.  I have some old IDE disks I could add for additional space but recently, Microcenter advertised a 1 terabyte drive for about $129.  What I'll probably do is put the 80 GB disk back in and leave its XP Pro install alone, then add a large secondary disk and install CentOS on that, so I have a dual boot setup.  Then I'll add another gig or so of RAM and it should be good to go.

The Bailout Mess

So far I haven't commented on the bailout proposed by Bush and is working its way through Congress. Two people who's opinions I respect, Jerry Pournelle and Robert Bruce Thompson, have differing opinions (both are linked in my blogroll if you want to see what they have to say).

Jerry supports a bailout and Robert opposes it. In the end, I have to come down on Robert's side in this debate and oppose the bill in its current form, or in any form for that matter. It is a disaster waiting to happen. At best, a bailout will prop up the house of cards a bit longer, merely delaying the necessary correction. I am concerned that by doing so, the eventual collapse will be made worse.  Much worse.

It is the nature of capitalism for bubbles to happen and then pop. The market needs a serious correction. Now. Actions must have consequence. The proposed bailout seeks to take private errors of judgement and socialize the poor consequnces, shifting the burden of poor decisions by investment bankers onto the backs of taxpayers.

Worse, by intertwining the Federal government even further into the market it lays the ground for fascism* or socialism. Both ideologies flourish in hard econimc times. Whether or not a completely laissez-faire capitalist system is the best can be debated among reasonable people. But fascism and socialism lead to tyranny.

Unfortunately too many useful idiots would welcome total goverment control over the market. Not me. Surely, the same people who brought us the IRS (renowned for customer service, and who couldn't run a profit at the Mustang Ranch when they seized it for back taxes), Amtrak, and No Child Gets Ahead Left Behind, couldn't possibly fuck up the economy beyond repair, could they?





* One of the biggest con jobs of 20th Century was the success of socialists and communists in getting fascism painted as a right-wing ideology. It's not. Fascism is more accurately described as socialism with a nationalist twist. Mussolini started out as a socialist. The formal name of the Nazi party in Germany was the NSDAP - the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

New Security System

Yesterday I got to work from home while an experimental home security and monitoring system got installed.  It's broadband-enabled, so that instead of using a phone line to contact the monitoring service, it uses my cable modem connection, with a cellular backup in case the cable modem connection goes down due to a system outage or tampering.

Included in the system are some door and window sensors, a motion sensor, a couple video cameras capable of streaming live video, a controller which can be used to automatically turn a lamp on or off, and a touch screen control panel.  Everything connects back to the central hub via wireless and the door/window sensors are battery powered with an ~5 year battery life.

Overall it's pretty slick and I look forward to exploring its capabilities.

Some Lab PC Upgrades

Roughly six months ago I submitted a request for various items for our lab.  E.g., some video cables and RAM upgrades for a few PCs and two G5 Power Macs.  The request finally made its way through my employer's bureaucracy and we got the items earlier this week.

Three of the PCs which we use for evaluating software and networking hardware in my lab are boxes that we got a couple years ago from Intel.  They have 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo CPUs, 120 GB SATA hard disks, and DVD burners.  Graphics and sound aren't anything special, but they are solid, well-built boxes.  Unfortunately, they only had one gig of RAM eachs.  So, I upgraded two of them with an additional 2 GB of RAM, bringing them to a total of 3 gigs.  This is the most that 32 bit XP will recognize, so maxing the boxes out with 8 GB (the maximum supported by the hardware) would be pointless.

I added another 4 GB to the remaining PC, however, for a total of 5 GB.  That box will get a fresh install of 64 bit Vista Enterprise.  I currently have 32 bit Vista Ultimate on it and with only 1 GB, it runs like a dog.  It's currently being used for some browser testing by another groups. Installing Vista x64 will have to wait until their current project is finished, however.

The G5s only had 512 MB of RAM each.  One is running OS 10.4.11 while the other has 10.5.5.  Tiger was OK on 512 MB but Leopard was pretty pokey.  Both boxes are noticeably snappier with 2 GB of RAM.

Updates at Obama Exposed

Just a reminder to check out my other blog Obama Exposed.  Plenty of recent updates.