As you already said, we secretly test on production in such cases.

I don't disagree with your point, but my argument was the line in the article claiming that someone was doing this with the intent of stopping a wrong doing. The intent is to make a boat load of cash. The result *may be* a discontinuance of the behavior, but if you read above, it's not likely such will happen.

These class-action lawsuits only serve one purpose - to make the lawfirm originating the class action a boatload of cash.

I have never used rsnapshot. A friend of the last admin where I work originally wrote the rsync-backup script. The former admin and myself wrote the 'backup' script as a wrapper for the other one, to produce a report, etc. The script here also uses links to factor files which do not change, but only on a host level (it won't pick up that two files are the same between hosts and only backup one of them.)

We have explored switching to Backup PC for the easier file restores, but the instances in which we need to restore anything is so rare that it's not an issue. As a side note, we're using these scripts to backup nearly 3.6TB of data for the company, and I use it for about 500GB of my own.

Last, something I didn't mention above is the scripts have support for creating an off-site copy. The way currently implemented, we rotate USB drives weekly for the offline copy. These copies do not have the versioned data, only last night's complete copy, which is under 1TB (but just). It would be fairly trivial to add code to send to a remote data center, your largest limiting factor being bandwidth.

That's all you need. We even use a script to create versioned backups going back six months using perl as a wrapper.

Assuming the same paths, edit to your liking. I've made the scripts available at http://www.secure-computing.net/rsync/ if you're interested. It requires the system you're running the script for have root ssh access to the boxes it's backing up. We use password-less ssh keys for authentication.

The README file has the line I use in my crontab. I didn't write the script, but I've made a few modifications to it over the years.

And as we've all had drilled into our heads 'RAID is not backup.'

What the phrase means is that simply installing a RAID on a given system is not a backup for that system. It is still more than acceptable to use *another* system, with a RAID or not, as the backup for the original system. For years, we've been running one large systems with tens of disks in a large RAID array as our backup system, for the other systems. The point of backups is to have the data in more than one place, regardless of where that place is. DVD, tape, an external disk, etc.

Drobo, or something similar, would be a perfect device for a home backup server.

I've found Nagios and NagVis a solid solution. NagVis is a plugin/addon for Nagios which allows you to create a Heads-Up display with status information on your own network diagram. It has an interactive map, which is 100% customizable. When kept in a browser window, it will play a sound during an event and flash the icon for a host indicating the problem.

PNP adds graphing of performance data to Nagios. It allows you to click through the nagios interface directly to the graphs for a given host or process. It will graph anything that has performance data output.

Finally, Cacti is a great solution for things which you may not roll into your Nagios insallation. We use it for monitoring network bandwidth utilization, mostly.

I help develop for a health care website, which is used internally by large clinics, etc, in Minnesota. With a strong, persistent insistence on clients switching from IE to Firefox, we've got from ~97% of users using IE to this month's stats showing 48.4% using IE, 50.8% using Firefox. We've also been pushing notices that IE6 has been EOL'd by Microsoft, and given links to upgrade to IE7. this has seen that 48.4% of IE users to be split with 20.3% of total users using IE7 and only 28.1% still using IE6.

IMHO, it's been a quite successful campaign. I'm not a huge fan of IE, in general, but it's far easier to code for IE7 than IE6.

Here's to the end of IE 6 and all the hacks needed for site to render correctly!

Openfire and the server, Spark is the client. http://igniterealtime.org./ We use it in healthcare where I work and it's pretty solid. Archiving is an optional module and works well.

Sure, but you know how geeks are. They're kind of like fat men and sex. When the get an opportunity, they put everything they've got into it.

The tag gives it away. Too bad.

I wouldn't be surprised if the whole achievement thing is a prank. Nevertheless, I've got mine unlocked!

For backups where I work, we've got a few different systems in place. We've done away with tape backups long ago, and our primary backup system is a disk-based system. Twelve drives in a RAID 6+0 for maximum availability and ability to recover from disk issues. This system keeps a daily snap shot from the past week, a weekly snap shot for the past month, and a monthly snap shot for the past six months. We then place the most recent daily snap shot on a USB external disk drive, which we carry off-site each day. This disk is encrypted and not connected to a network or otherwise available except physically.

This has worked well, and if the proverbial crap does hit the fan, we've got our off-site disk for last-chance recovery if the world comes to an end.

I spent a decade in the physical security realm, and I still own a small firm doing security systems, etc. I wanted to get in to IT as a Unix/BSD/Linux admin, so I started getting my name out there years ago. When an ideal job came up, I had a resume I was happy with, describing how my current and past positions would help me with my newly-sought position, whether there was any direct relation or not. From there, I showed some things to prove I could do it. I accepted a slight pay decrease to get my foot in the door with a clause that allowed for a large pay increase should I prove my worth. I've been working in my new IT career for over two years, and I got the large pay bump I sought.

This first thing you need to do is become a salesman. You need to learn how to sell yourself. If you're not confident, any prospective employer will figure that out. A good, solid resume will get you in the door for an interview, but you've got to demonstrate your ability.