We had Monday off as recognition of the long hours spent on the recent Ghost release. I did a bit of tidying up and gardening (don’t need to push through foliage to get to the front door now).

My washing machine hasn’t been working. I’d got the professional repair man in. He listened to it for a few seconds then said there was something in the pump. I was stuck then, because I’d already pulled it apart and checked in the pump, but that might violate the warranty, so I couldn’t say that. But foreign objects in the pump also certainly isn’t covered by the warranty either. Catch 22.

Anyway I pulled the machine apart again and yes! a 10 cent piece did fall out of the pump. It must have been hidden up the hose last time I checked. Put it all back together, and still the machine wasn’t working correctly. One more time I pulled it apart and found yet another 10 cent peice. Don’t know how they got in there. I do check the pockets when I put washing in.

To get at the pump on a Sanyo ASW-90WRTP washing machine involves opening the back of the machine and detaching the hose from the drum. To shake the coin (it is always a coin) out of the pump use an allen key to undo the screws which go in underneath the base of the machine and hold the pump in place. (Doing this on my old F&P was much easier). Saved myself the $200 the repair man said it would cost if I wanted to pay him to do it. Must remember to put the back cover back on sometime.

Now the washing machine is working OK and I can catch up on the dirty clothes which have piled up in the meantime. Being extra careful to check in the pockets.

How can you be really confident of your backups? My cunning plan is to mirror my whole website back onto my home box so I can see that I have all the data safely duplicated. When I say “my plan” I really mean I stole the idea off Ralph who has had his web site served both from ihug and from his home box for ~4 years.

The content on mysite is in the MySQL database and various files. The files are easy to mirror with rsync. Getting the database mirrored has been a lot more fun.

I use a SSH tunnel to securely connect the database on the webserver with its mirror on my home box. MySQL can support SSL connections, but using a tunnel seemed easier. I didn’t want to enslave the main MySQL server on my home box so instead I run a new MySQL server with a custom socket and port. I then set this up to connect to the master server on the webserver. The commands for this are in localdbsetup.sh.

Every half an hour I have a cron job run localsync.sh which rsyncs the files across and checks that the MySQL replication is still running. I can check my data is ok just by looking at the mirrored website. Then each night localbkup.sh runs to dump the data from the mirror and tarball it up.

Seems to be working pretty well. Yes, it is massive overkill just for a simple website backup, but it was an interesting project for the long weekend.

The top 10 commands from your shell meme. Here’s mine (from my server rata):

history | awk '{print $2}' | awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -10
159 ls
117 cd
59 scp
29 gvim
28 ssh
24 mv
21 mysql
20 locate
19 su
13 rm

So what does this say?

• ls most of the time I’m only looking
• cd then I’m gone
• scp the data is always greener on another host
• gvim I do do some work
• ssh but I wish I was somewhere else
• mv maybe moving things around will help?
• mysql ok, just lately I’m playing around with MySQL replication, more about that later
• locate I’m so lost
• su time to call upon a higher power
• rm when all else fails try something destructive

When you can spend all evening watching StrongBad Email.

OK, I probably shouldn’t admit to that.

I am greedy, I have two domain names. The question is which one is better? I got linuxsoftware.co.nz first. It narrowly won over professional-bum.co.nz. I’ve been using it for a long time, but another friend Tracy said it was too long and I needed something shorter. About then software.net.nz came free so I nabbed that.

Now I have these two domains I’m not sure which is better?

• software.net.nz is quicker to type
• people tend to forget the .net.nz part and type software.co.nz (not mine)
• linuxsoftware says a bit more than just software (they’re both too generic)
• I have been using linuxsoftware longer

Perhaps I should get a whole new domain name? Suggestions?