Web Server

I've been messing around with SVN, trying to set up a WebDAV service to stash some drupal themes in. I keep screwing up the initial import at which point a quick round of rm -r /var/svn/rocksoc && svnadmin create /var/svn/rocksoc and I'm back to where I started. Intill I take a break for lunch and have a brain fade and type rm -r /var/www/rocksoc

Opps

It's a really good job I keep backups

I search through the backup server. /var/www is missing

It turns out that I'd had a brainfade in setting up backupninja and missed out /var/www

Fortunately I'd made a tarball of the directory last night and copied it to my dev server. Total downtime, about 6 minutes, and most of that was waiting for the tarball to scp back to the server.

Ever shutdown/rebooted the wrong machine through ssh+carelessness? molly-guard comes to the rescue, asking you to type the hostname of the machine you intend to shut down if it detects you are connected by ssh. It's packaged for and available in the main repositories Debian and Ubuntu, I don't know about any other distros.

An example:

[sudo] password for charles:
W: molly-guard: SSH session detected!
Please type in hostname of the machine to reboot: lucifer

Broadcast message from charles@lucifer
(/dev/pts/0) at 17:44 ...

The system is going down for reboot NOW!

I am moving my linode to the Newark (New Jersey) data centre as it's a lot closer to the UK. This site will be down briefly

Overly hot hard disks are bad. I think we all know that. It doesn't stop us worrying about our data, but a problem can't be fixed unless we know it's a problem. Opening cases and touching hard drive to see if they are hot is the most low tech of approaches, but it's cheap and completely cross platform.