Category: English

Backing up your VMs

A few weeks ago, I finally got my Drobo (a B800i with eight 2 TB disks) set up correctly so I can back up my Windows 7 computer to it. The only data I really care about on that computer are my VirtualBox VMs—so imagine my surprise when I discovered today that they weren’t being backed up! It turns out that with the default settings (“let Windows choose”), it does not back up your entire home directory, but only AppData, your desktop, your libraries, and a handful of other directories (including Downloads). Since VirtualBox stores VMs in a separate directory under your home directory rather than in AppData\Local or even My Documents, Windows Backup does not include them. If you want it to, you’ll have to either configure backups manually, or create a library that includes your VMs.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter, because backing up a VM’s disk image while it’s running is mostly pointless. Until now, I’ve been backing up my FreeBSD desktop by the simple expedient of rsync’ing ~des to a server with redundant storage; when I get around to it, I’ll set up a Bacula server backed by the Drobo.

My nerd is showing

Annoyance of the day, triggered by rifling through my considerable collection of geek T-shirts this morning, trying to decide what to wear: I have the Wil Wheaton Code shirt, but can’t wear it because people think it’s me. I don’t want to be known as the guy who wears a shirt with a picture of himself. The only person who’s ever recognized it at first sight was my fifty-something boss. Instead of «who’s that?», he asked «Star Trek or BBT?». I almost proposed to him on the spot.

(I finally settled on the discontinued ThinkGeek code monkey shirt)

Not too proud to beg

I’ve added two items to the FreeBSD donations wantlist.

The first, and most important, is hosting for a new source tinderbox  / continuous integration cluster. The source tinderbox currently run on three servers graciously donated, maintained and hosted by Sentex which can handle approximately two full builds per day. The University of Oslo recently replaced its old HPC cluster, and I’ve secured 28 1U nodes (including rack-mount kits but no power cords) from the old one which I hope to be able to use for a new source tinderbox cluster with a completely new, more efficient implementation, but I have nowhere to host them. As noted in the wantlist entry, once installed, the cluster will not require large amounts of external bandwidth—just enough to keep an svn mirror regularly updated and to serve the web frontend—but it will need a dedicated gigabit switch or partition for internal communication. The hosting center needs to be within driving distance of Oslo, Norway.

The second item is a request for parts to upgrade my main FreeBSD development box: an Intel H77-based motherboard, an Intel Core i7-3770S CPU and 32 GB of PC3-12800 RAM. I already have a case, a sufficiently powerful PSU and plenty of disks. I’d also like to replace my old Chieftec hot-swap frames with a pair of trayless four-disk frames such as this one or preferably this one which has one large fan instead of two small ones (and is therefore presumably quieter) but is not available in Norway.

You can also use the button in the sidebar to make a donation which will go towards hardware, software and hosting costs related to my FreeBSD and Open Source work.

Transition

If you can see this, I have successfully moved my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress instance.

This was not a trivial endeavor. I have had this blog since 2006, and there are links to it all over the net. I did not want to break those links, nor did I want them to point to an abandoned Blogger instance. In particular, I wanted readers to still be able to comment on old posts. Continue reading “Transition”