It gets worse. Xerox wants a consulting division, so they are planning to buy Affiliated Computer Services. If Dell and HP can buy consulting companies, why shouldn't Xerox?

Problem is, ACS is in the bottom 25 of worst places to work. (Entry #21). The former head of ACS left due to a back-dating-stock-options scandal, and as a part of his golden parachute, the ACS Board gave him a $1 million per year salary allowance for security services. He needs $1 million per year in bodyguards, and the Board gave it to him. Oh yeah, they are a class act with the utmost integrity.

And Xerox wants to marry them.

In my opinion, if you have Xerox stock, sell it. Sell it now.

Now I get it. Do rsync's all week long, as new data gets written, and then when the system is shut down on Friday night, launch one last rsync to capture the delta since the last rsync. When that is done, bring up the system, and THEN begin the tar.gz to the backup volume.

My downtime would be limited to that last rsync through two million folders.

That is a good idea. Due to a fluke in the SAN performance (it lost a lot of data on the cheap disks, so now no-one trusts it for long term storage) I could easily add another LUN for yet-another-staging-area. There are terabytes of disk sitting idle I could use.

Thanks!

I'm pretty sure we have no Solaris in our environment. Tons of SuSE servers in Xen virtual machines. We also have an Arcserve agent that backs up each VM inside the OS just like it was a stand-alone server. So that's the environment I can work inside. If SuSE can do it, I'm gold.

I know that the LVM stuff is something the other server guys use and understand. I think it gets a little weird when you have LUNs coming from a SAN and you reboot the host VM after adding or removing a new LUN. Somewhere in there if you aren't careful, SCSI IDs change and havoc ensues.

We're looking at a new backup system that will be able to be SAN aware. It could make my backup troubles go away. But it isn't likely until July 2010 at best, and with the economic situation, it could be pushed back to 2011 or 2012.

So I'm trying make sure the data is safe in the mean time, and keep the down time to a minimum.

If there is some rsync magic for concatenating a bunch of files into one, I haven't found it. Not to say it isn't there - just that I don't know how to do it.

You do point out the dangerously large amounts of energy involved. However, I think we'll get to replicators via incremental transformation of energy to mass, so that we don't have to deal with the whole 21 MT at once. ;-)

For what it is worth, one of the ideas for quantum computing is to solve all permutations of an equation at once, and pick the one answer that matches (is reversible to the solution). If we get used to atomic transforms at whole-solid scales, we might be able to take that step to energy --> mass conversion and have enough experience to not blow up the planet.

Interesting. This is exactly the reason I put this out there - to get ideas I would never have thought of. Thank you.

I'd have to document it thoroughly - but it could be a rapid speed saver.

So far, I've tried Reiser FS, ext3, and XFS. Really, I could probably try ext2, because it is just a staging area for tape. But I don't know which file system is best for being the destination of one (or maybe a few) big ol' files that are the concat of a huge number of small files.

On a different box, for a different reason, I found some system tweaks for making NFS work better in parallel. I wonder if there are similar tweaks for file systems that are (essentially) write-once.

Anyway, thank you for the ideas. They are appreciated.

I could do this. I'm not a stranger to programming, and it makes a lot of sense. The basic problem is that the vendor does 256^3 subdirectories to minimize directory name conflicts. If I do one .tar job per top-level directory, then I've split the work load 256 times. So spawning that many number of jobs should see a substantial speed up as work is done in parallel - I'll let the OS job scheduler figure out how to optimize the workload. ;-)

Thanks!

That is a good point. They really are additive, so this should work.

Thanks!

Seconded. After putting in my SPF records, the amount of backscatter dropped a huge amount. Presumably the rest of the world got a little better too, as they could tell who the forgers are.

There was one contemplation point in the book that was outside the norm of what you would learn in school: "what is quality?" (define quality).

Prior to reading the book, you probably could not have answered that question. After reading the book, you can. It ties into the opening line of the book: "And what is good, Phaedrus,
and what is not good -- Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"

Outside of that, it made for an interesting drama.

So I was installing SuSE on our new z/OS mainframe (to a virtual machine guest to be specific), and the list of packages being installed was scrolling by: gstreamer.s390

And I'm thinking to myself "who, on God's Green Earth, had the job of porting audio to an EBCDIC based mainframe?" Talk about bizarro world....

But then I thought sure, it may not be used much; but when it does, it could launch 3,840 streams at 130 decibel. It's a Beowulf cluster of Rick Astley in a single box! And THAT is all worth it.

I wouldn't delete the slashdot account. But yes, other places (Facebook) now have more draw.

It kills me (well, makes me feel bad) that organizations for whom the English language is their primary trade, make these mistakes. Everyone there is a paid wordsmith. Gad.

I'm sure you've heard the old adage "company is like fish - after three days they begin to smell". ;-)

I find that when I visit others, it works out best if I ask for an invite less than three days in a row. Of course, if I've spent a lot of money to get there, it's hard not to want to get my money's worth....

Luckily for me, my mom is local, and my little brother is living with my mom. This year, my (definitely NON-local) brother is coming into town, so it will be nice to have the whole family together this Christmas.

Changing directions - I like the Multiply group. I'm on Facebook too, of course - but it is so shallow, it takes a whole ten minutes of my day. The people on Multiply I can spend hours with. Since the emigration from Slashdot, I find I don't check the 'dot but every few days. Slashdot ignored my frustrations enough that I've made Multiply my home.