My normal line speed is only 512Kbs and sometimes I struggle to achieve even this.

My solution is to use an Internet Acceleration Appliance, the building and configuration of which is detailed at….

www.InternetAccelerationAppliance.com

Now, whilst that works very well, the server that it runs on needs an upgrade (I’m going to add some more memory and another couple of SCSI disks) and will then be used for a number crunching/data processing project that I am about to embark on.

Now, I was resigned to losing the speed increase that the server gave me but today, over a cup of coffee in a little bar in the nearest village, I wondered to myself whether I could just install the functionality of the server onto my local PC.

I couldn’t see any reason why not and, less than an hour later, it was done.

Caching DNS Proxy Server

I started off by installing PDNSD as a local caching DNS server.

The instructions and reasons for doing this are detailed at www.internetaccelerationappliance.com – installing pdnsd so I’ll just offer a brief recap here….

What is DNS?

Imagine, if you will, that you want to send a letter to your friend Joe Bloggs. If you were just to address that letter to Joe Bloggs, it would almost certainly never arrive.

If, however, you were to address that letter to Joe’s address… 24 Staunton Court, Streatham, London, England then, sooner or later, it will be delivered.

The internet is similar. We know sites by their names (i.e. www.google.com) but the delivery service needs the address (in this case the IP address – 74.125.77.104)

When we type www.google.com into our browser, that information goes up the line to our Service Provider (in my case Orange.fr)

Now, the server(s) at Orange don’t know who Google.com is so they have to look up an address for it. For this, they request the information from their DNS servers. These are basically just servers that contain lists of names and their associated IP addresses. A bit like telephone directories except there can only be one Google.com whereas in a telephone directory there may be many entries for Joe Bloggs.

If the local DNS servers at Orange.fr don’t have an address, then the request is forwarded to the national DNS servers and then, finally, the root DNS servers (which, for .COM addresses are in Singapore.)

All this can take time. What we are going to do here is make this process local so that every time we get an IP address from the Service Provider, it is going to be noted here in a local caching DNS server so that the next time we want to visit Google.com we don’t have to wait for Orange.fr to supply the address – we’ll already have it.

Hopefully this will speed up my effective internet speed.

pdnsd installation

1).  On my Debian system the installation was simple….

apt-get install pdnsd dnsutils

2). Once this is complete we need to edit one file…

nano /etc/default/pdnsd and press Enter. This will load the file in the nano text editor.

Change line 2 so that it reads… START_DAEMON=yes

Ctrl & O – to save file and press Enter

3).  Now we need to edit the pdnsd configuration file (/etc/psdnd.conf)

My /etc/pdnsd.conf now looks like this….

global {
perm_cache=1024;
cache_dir=”/var/cache/pdnsd”;
run_as=”pdnsd”;
server_ip = 127.0.0.1;
server_port=53;
status_ctl = on;
paranoid=on;
query_method=udp_tcp;
max_ttl=1w; # One week.
timeout=10;
}
server {
label=OpenDNS;
ip=208.67.222.222;
ip=208.67.220.220;
timeout=30;
uptest=ping;
interval=30;
ping_timeout=300;
purge_cache=off;
caching=on;
preset=off;
}
source {
owner=localhost;
serve_aliases=on;
file=”/etc/hosts”;
}
rr {
name=localhost;
reverse=on;
a=127.0.0.1;
owner=localhost;
soa=localhost,root.localhost,42,86400,900,86400,86400;
}
global {perm_cache=1024;cache_dir=”/var/cache/pdnsd”;run_as=”pdnsd”; server_ip = 127.0.0.1; server_port=53;status_ctl = on;paranoid=on; query_method=udp_tcp;max_ttl=1w; # One week.timeout=10; }server {label=OpenDNS;ip=208.67.222.222;ip=208.67.220.220;timeout=30;uptest=ping;interval=30; ping_timeout=300;purge_cache=off;caching=on;preset=off;}
source {owner=localhost;serve_aliases=on;file=”/etc/hosts”;}
rr {name=localhost;reverse=on;a=127.0.0.1;owner=localhost; soa=localhost,root.localhost,42,86400,900,86400,86400;}

4). Now we must resolv.conf - nano /etc/resolv.conf and press Enter

Change the file so that it contains just one line which reads exactly as follows….. nameserver 127.0.0.1

5). Because my machine already used a fixed IP address I didn’t have to do the following, you may have to if you use DHCP…

Edit dhclient.conf - nano /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and press Enter

Find the line that starts #prepend domain-name-servers (about 20 lines down) and remove the # so that the line reads as follows… prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

Ctrl & O – to save file and press Enter

Ctrl & X – to quit nano

6).  Finally, Edit interfaces - nano /etc/network/interfaces

Edit the line that starts… dns-nameservers so that it reads….. dns-nameservers 192.168.1.2

Ctrl & O – to save file and press Enter

Ctrl & X – to quit nano

Reboot the machine.

7). Log into the rebooted machine, open a terminal and type in the command…

dig Google.com

Note the Query time: (this is the time spent to retrieve Google’s IP address from the OpenDNS servers) – on my machine it was 316 msec.

Now run the same command again (arrow up will redisplay the last command.)

Note the Query time: (the address should be resolved locally by pdnsd) – it should now be about 3 msec.

Squid Caching Proxy Server

Now it’s time to install the squid caching proxy server – this is even easier!

What is a caching Proxy Server?

Now that pdnsd knows the IP Address of Google, we are saving some time everytime we wish to visit Google (by not having to look up the IP Address at Orange.fr’s DNS servers.)

But, we are still downloading logo.gif (the Google logo) from the site and even at only 8Kb large, it is using up some of our bandwidth.

What our caching proxy server does is keep a copy of that logo (and a whole hosts of other HTTP Objects) and, according to a complex set of rules, doesn’t bother going to the originating site the next time the object is requested – it delivers it from its local cache.

This can dramatically reduce bandwidth.

Now, Google is a well designed site with a minimum of logos and graphics to download – not all sites are as austere as Google. Over a period of time, a store of HTTP objects (graphics/webpages etc.) will be built up in the cache and these will be served to any machines on the network that are accessing the cache.

Squid installation

1).  Start off by installing Squid.  On my Debian system all I have to do was type apt-get install squid.

2).  Now we need to stop squid - /etc/init.d/squid stop and press Enter

3).  We need to edit /etc/squid/squid.conf

This is my squid.conf

# Access Control Lists
acl all src all
acl manager proto cache_object
acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/32
acl to_localhost dst 127.0.0.0/8
acl localnet src 10.0.0.0/8 # RFC1918 possible internal network
acl localnet src 172.16.0.0/12 # RFC1918 possible internal network
acl localnet src 192.168.0.0/16 # RFC1918 possible internal network
acl SSL_ports port 443 # https
acl SSL_ports port 563 # snews
acl SSL_ports port 873 # rsync
acl Safe_ports port 80 # http
acl Safe_ports port 21 # ftp
acl Safe_ports port 443 # https
acl Safe_ports port 70 # gopher
acl Safe_ports port 210 # wais
acl Safe_ports port 1025-65535 # unregistered ports
acl Safe_ports port 280 # http-mgmt
acl Safe_ports port 488 # gss-http
acl Safe_ports port 591 # filemaker
acl Safe_ports port 777 # multiling http
acl Safe_ports port 631 # cups
acl Safe_ports port 873 # rsync
acl Safe_ports port 901 # SWAT
acl apache rep_header Server ^Apache
acl mydomain src 192.168.1.1-192.168.1.24/255.255.255.255
acl purge method PURGE
acl CONNECT method CONNECT

# Refresh patterns
refresh_pattern ^ftp: 1440 20% 10080
refresh_pattern ^gopher: 1440 0% 1440
refresh_pattern -i (/cgi-bin/|\?) 0 0% 0
refresh_pattern (Release|Package(.gz)*)$ 0 20% 2880
refresh_pattern . 0 50% 40320
refresh_pattern -i \.jpg$ 3600 90% 40320 override-expire override-lastmod reload-into-ims ignore-reload
refresh_pattern -i \.jpeg$ 3600 90% 40320 override-expire override-lastmod reload-into-ims ignore-reload
refresh_pattern -i \.gif$ 3600 90% 40320 override-expire override-lastmod reload-into-ims ignore-reload
refresh_pattern -i \.html 300 50% 10 ignore-reload
http_access allow manager localhost
http_access deny manager
http_access allow purge localhost
http_access deny purge
http_access deny !Safe_ports
http_access deny CONNECT !SSL_ports
http_access allow localhost
http_access allow mydomain
http_access deny all

# Denying non-necessary access
icp_access allow localnet
icp_access deny all
htcp_access allow localnet
htcp_access deny all

# Stopping stuff we don’t need
log_fqdn off
log_icp_queries off
buffered_logs on
emulate_httpd_log off
client_db off
cache_store_log none
memory_pools off
forwarded_for off

#General config stuff
http_port 3128
visible_hostname brahms-squid
hierarchy_stoplist cgi-bin ?
coredump_dir /var/spool/squid
cache_mgr squid@brahms.com
access_log /var/log/squid/access.log squid

# Caching stuff
cache_mem 64 MB
cache_dir diskd /var/spool/squid 4000 16 256
maximum_object_size_in_memory 32 KB
maximum_object_size 128 MB
request_body_max_size 8 MB

# DNS Stuff
hosts_file /etc/hosts
dns_testnames 127.0.0.1
dns_nameservers 127.0.0.1

4). Now we only need to restart squid by typing /etc/squid/squid start and then forcing it to re-read the config file by typing squid -k reconfigure

5).  You will need to set up your browser to use the local proxy server.

To do this just find the configuration screen (this will vary from one browser to another) and set the broser to access the internet via a proxy server.  Use an IP address of 127.0.0.1 and a port of 3128.  Now tick the box that says Use this proxy server for all protocols and click on the OK button.

Conclusion

It’s difficult to tell how much this has speeded up my internet access as I was using a separate caching proxy server before.

I know that it’s very rare for me to wait for a website to be found (a function of the DNS server) and once I have visited a site once, the following time the graphics just snap into place (no waiting at all!)

Overall, this has proven to be an extremely simple way to improve my internet access without resorting to additional hardware.

My pdnsd.conf and squid.conf files are available at http://www.kmeckstein.com/data/pdnsd.conf and http://www.kmeckstein.com/data/squid.conf

To download them you just need to use…

wget http://www.kmeckstein.com/data/pdnsd.conf and

wget http://www.kmeckstein.com/data/squid.conf

All the best

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A Taste of Garlic is a blog review site where I review, on a daily basis, blogs by people who have moved to France. It gets between 1,200 and 1,600 visitors a day but remains with a Google Page Rank of 3, the same it had when it was only getting half that number of unique visits.

I was reading around the subject and noticed that many SEO advisors suggested that it was vitally important that the <title>Title</title> change for every post/page.

That caused me some concern!

Here’s why….

A few months ago I did some work to speed up A Taste of Garlic – I wrote about it here – Six ways to speed up Wordpress.

One of the things I did was to rewrite the code in the header file (Header.php) that produces the Title.

Originally it was like this….
<title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

and I changed it to…

<title>A Taste of Garlic</title>

Well, that saved a php/mySQL lookup – surely that’s a good thing?

Maybe, but it also meant that every page/post would have a title tag of A Taste of Garlic – not so good!

I quickly opened up header.php and changed the offending line to the following…

<title><?php the_title(); ?> – A Taste of Garlic – Life & Living in France Blogs – <?php $category = get_the_category(); echo $category[0]->cat_name;?></title>

which gives this as a title (for a typical post)…

<title>Baguettes and Roses – A Taste of Garlic – Life & Living in France Blogs – Poitou-Charentes</title>

That’s more like it.

Now I know that Google only displays the first 65 characters of the title (as compare to Yahoo who display 120 characters) but there seems no clear understanding if they index more than 65 characters of the title tag.  I think that I’ve now got a title tag with relevant keywords that is still humanly readable and, more importantly, helpful to the casual visitor.

Whilst I was at it, I edited index.php and single.php and changed this….

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class=”post” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>
<h2><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<div class=”entry”>
<?php the_content(“Read more about… ” . get_the_title(”, ”, false)); ?>
</div>

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class=”post” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>
<h1><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Link to <?php the_title(); ?> – Life in France blogs all about living in France as an expat – <?php $category = get_the_category(); echo $category[0]->cat_name;?>”><?php the_title(); ?>
<?php $category = get_the_category();
If ($category[0]->cat_name==”General”){}
Elseif ($category[0]->cat_name==”Blogiversary”){}
Elseif ($category[0]->cat_name==”That was the week….”){}
Elseif ($category[0]->cat_name==”French Links”){}
Elseif ($category[0]->cat_name==”Hints and Tips”){}
Elseif ($category[0]->cat_name==”Recipes from France”){}
Elseif ($category[0]->cat_name==”Saturday Sites”){}
Elseif ($category[0]->cat_name==”UK Shopping in France”){}
else{echo ” – ” . $category[0]->cat_name;}?>
</a></h1>
<div class=”entry”>
<?php the_content(“Read more about… ” . get_the_title(”, ”, false)); ?>
</div>

This might not be the prettiest php code in the world but it does the job for the moment.

Basically, the post title gets changed from a <h2> tag to a <h1> tag.  I adjusted the display sizes of both tags so that they looked right on screen.

The post title now also gets followed by the category name (almost always the Region of France that the blog I’m reviewing is based in) unless it’s one of a select few categories that wouldn’t make sense to display.

Whether this will make any difference to my page rank for A Taste of Garlic I have absolutely no idea – but it certainly can’t hurt.

Now I need to do something similar with my other blogs….

And sort out that horrible php code!

All the best

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The Codfather (how cool a name is that?  I wish my parents had given me a cool name like that rather than Keith!) explains Speeding up your Linux browser using a ramdisk.

I’m going to copy the basic instructions but you should really check out Cods Place – it’s full of interesting little tips and news – mainly about Linux!

On the site there are instructions for doing this for Chrome and for Firefox.

I’m only going to show the Chrome instructions as that’s what I use.

1) create the directoty - sudo mkdir /var/ramdisk

2) then edit this file and add the following line at the end - gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

/var/ramdisk /var/ramdisk tmpfs size=512m 0 0

3) Now mount this new ramdisk to test - sudo mount /var/ramdisk

We now have our ramdisk, and we can add this to the start options for Chromium.

Add –disk-cache-dir=/var/ramdisk to the command/icon that you use to start Chrome.

I’ve been using this for a couple of weeks now – I’m not sure how much it has speeded up Chrome because it was pretty damn fast to start with.

It certainly hasn’t slowed it down – that’s for sure!

All the best

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I going to blog all about that at TheFridayBlog (my writing blog) tomorrow!

One thing that I won’t mention there is the minor setback that occurred due to my stupidity and lack of thought.

The problem was rsync!

I decided (quite rightly) that it would be rather sensible to back up the writing machine not only to gmail (my normal process) and to an external USB drive (I just happened to have a spare one available) but also to my server.

Rather than write a backup script from scratch I decided to use an old one and just change the locations.

The edited script (this is just an extract – the bit that did the damage!) that I used was as follows….

# And then back Elgar up to Mozart….
rsync -av –progress –delete –log-file=/home/keckstein/Backup/$(date +%d%m%Y)_Elgar_backup.log /home/keckstein/ /media/Mozart

And what’s wrong with that, I hear you ask?

Yes, it looked OK to me at first glance.

There are (as I later found to my cost) two problems…

1).  I should have been rsyncing the data to it’s own directory on Mozart (rather than the root of the share) and

2). I really should have thought harder about that –delete parameter!

Normally I like to use the –delete parameter for disk  to disc backup copy jobs.

What happens is this; if you delete a file on the source drive (the drive that you are backing up), rsync will also delete that file from the destination drive (the drive you are backing up to.)

All well and good. The destination drive is a mirror copy of the source drive. That’s what we want, isn’t it?

What happened the first time I ran the backup script (it contained a lot more than just that one line but, that one line was more than enough to cause me a whole pile of grief!) was that the files were copied from Chatwin to Mozart – no problem there.

Then rsync deleted every file on Mozart that didn’t exist on Chatwin!

Oops!

The main data share on Mozart contains all of our photos, our ebook library, our day to day financial and business data and other important stuff like that!

Luckily, we automatically back the main drive on Mozart up to an archive drive in the same box;  that’s where I leave customer backups when I rebuild their machines – when I start running out of space they get deleted in date order.

A quick check showed me that the previous night’s backup had worked (one of the reasons I like rsync to write a logfile every time I invoke it) and a quick copy job  restored the data.

So, not such a disaster but it could have been so, so much worse.

I suppose that the lessons learned here are….

1).  Treat rsync with a bit of respect.  It WILL do exactly what you tell it to!

2).  Always do a dummy run first!

3).  Always think twice about that –delete parameter!

4).  Always think twice about reusing old scripts.  It might have done the job that you wanted it to but will they do the job that you  now want it to?

There’s a great resource on rsync here and here.

Of course, the wiser amongst you might have wondered what would have happened if the overnight script to backup Mozart also used the –delete parameter and if I hadn’t noticed the problem with the first script until the next day?

I believe that Oh shit! would have been the kindest of all the many things that I would have had to say!

All the best

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Introduction

Recently I have noticed that one of my sites,  A Taste of Garlic seemed to be loading slower than before.

I determined to do something about speeding it up.

Starting with some of the hints and tips found on Computing Unleashed I had a delve around to see what I could do.

Normally I connect to the internet via a caching proxy server – for the purposes of this experiment I configured Chrome to connect direct.

To measure any changes in website performance I used the excellent tools at http://tools.pingdom.com

The Starting Point

These are the results of the first Pingdom.com test. At this point I don’t know where the problem is but I do know that a site load time of 4.7 seconds is way too long! A Taste of Garlic is a Wordpress based site and runs on a leased server at 1and1.fr The server runs the following… Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) DAV/2 SVN/1.5.1 PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny9 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.0

Step One: Reduce PHP Queries

I started off by opening every one of the PHP files that go to make up the site in a text editor and hard coding the file locations rather than using the normal PHP database queries.

This example (404.php) shows what I did…

<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/header.jpg" alt="Taste of Garlic" width="650" height="170" />

gets changed to…

<img src="http://www.atasteofgarlic.com/wp-content/themes/mediterranean/images/header.jpg" alt="Taste of Garlic" width="650" height="170" />

I did this for all the PHP files; basically just trying to remove every PHP database query for anything that could be hardcoded. To find out the static locations that I used to replace to PHP lookups, I just loaded the PHP file in Chrome and then viewed the source. I then tested the site load speed….. The load time had decreased slightly (by 0.7 seconds) which represents a 15% increase in speed.

A good start but I get the feeling that there are many more issues to be looked at.

Step Two: Remove Redundant Plugins

I decided to remove All in one SEO Pack, SEO Friendly Images and Sociable. This left just Askimet, Feedburner Feedsmith and Google XML Sitemaps. Another test  and the result was. even better. I had no idea that the plugins had so much effect. As well as deactivating the plugins, I made a point of deleting the directories as well.

Step Three: Database Maintenance

The next step was to try and tidy up the back-end database that hadn’t had much attention since the site was launched about 9 months ago.

I started off by pruning old revisions from the Wordpress database.

To start with wp_posts had 3653 rows.

I ran (in phpMyAdmin) the following phrase….

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”;

That reduced the row count by 2673 rows!

Surely it’s going to be faster to find an entry out of a table with only 980 rows (rather than the 3653 it had before?)

Then, to tidy things up, I selected (once again, in phpMyAdmin), all the tables and ran a REPAIR followed by an OPTIMISE.

Moment of truth time….

And this, I’m afraid to say, made absolutely no difference at all!

I don’t think that it was the wrong thing to do – perhaps it just doesn’t have any effect on loading the home page?

Step Four: Optimise Images

A Taste of Garlic is image heavy.

Every post will have an image of a screenshot of the site that I am reviewing.

Nothing that I could do about that. But I could ensure that the images displayed were as small as possible. To do this, I SSH’d into the server and went to the wp-content/uploads/2010/09 directory and ran mogrify -quality 75 *jpg I repeated this for every directory under wp-content/uploads.

On average this reduced image size by 44% without reducing the visual quality to any noticeable amount.

A further speed increase – I’m starting to enjoy this!

Step Five: Install Caching

The next step was to install caching. I decided to use the W3 Total Cache plugin as it seemed to offer the most options. For ages it didn’t seem to make any difference but then, all of a sudden I got some decent results. The load time has been varying over the last few hours – I’m guessing that this must be due to visitors to Garlic and all the other sites on the server?

Step Six: A Final Tidy Up

The excellent metrics shown by http://tools.pingdom.com allowed me to see where the other bottlenecks lay.

I decided to remove Google Analytics as I never looked at the results. At the same time, I also removed some social networking and visitor counter javascript code.

There were a couple of images files that weren’t in place so I copied them over.

I reduced the number of posts on the host page to 15. I could go lower than this but the whole point of A Taste of Garlic is that it is a blog review site and the links to the blogs that I have reviewed appear in the sidebar.

Thus, until I redesign the site, the sidebar is going to stay rather long (and get longer every week.)

Conclusion

I’m happy with the speedup I’ve managed to produce so far. Certainly, the site seems faster that it was. The next step will be thinking about the 20 or so graphics that are on the main page – if there were some way of caching these into server memory, that may make a difference to load times.

I hope that you’ve found this useful. I’ve still got some more work to do and will report on the results of the next set of performance improvements in about a month or so.

Of course, if you know of anything I should be trying, please let me know.

All the best

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I’m grateful for all the comments on last week’s post (it seems that many other people are also passionate about Puppy Linux) and I am going to take them into account within this post.

I should start off by saying that I posted the wrong link last week…..

My link was to Puppy 5.0; there is a newer (and better) version (5.01) available at http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-5.0.1/lupu-501.iso (thanks; Joe Plaziak for that heads up!)

ICPUG suggested that I should be showing a link to….

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-5.0.1 as this would show the distribution directory and allow you to download the MD5 file to be able to check the download.  As he said… “Nothing worse than having users say Puppy doesn’t work but in reality they got a bad download or burnt the CD incorrectly!”

Quite right too!

There were many other comments about last week’s post and you can read all of them at http://www.kmeckstein.com/linux/and-they-call-it-puppy-love/#comments

Before I get started I will mention that, when I have to take clients’ machines away to be backed up and rebuilt, I leave a small loan machine in its place.

These small machines are small format 600 MHz Celerons with an 8GB hard drive and 256MB of RAM.  The clients, without exception, have no problems doing their normal day to day work (or pleasure) using Puppy – the only adjustment for them is to use Pigeon rather than MSN for their instant messaging.

My clients love these machines but what they really love is Puppy.  “So fast”, “So easy to use”, “So quick to boot up…” (mostly I’ve taken their machines away to back them up and re-install Windows XP because of boot times in excess of 5 minutes!) – these are the sort of comments that I hear!

So, what is it that makes Puppy so special?

10 Reasons to love Puppy Linux

1). Speed : Puppy is fast; no two ways about it!

By that I mean the speed with which applications load and the ensuing responsiveness.

Often, even when running Puppy in a virtual machine or on an old 600MHz Celeron with 256MB of Ram, I find myself considering reducing the sensisivity of the mouse.

I wonder how often Windows users ask themselves “How do I slow this machine down?”

Now, I know that fast modern machines are becoming very affordable and the machine that you can buy in your local supermarket for a few hundred euros will run pretty much any operating system but….

Because Puppy runs so well on older systems, we don’t need to spend money upgrading.  Also, Puppy makes it possible to run some of the new, energy efficient small format systems such as Netbooks and Net-tops.  The cost savings (in terms of energy consumption) and the reduction in desk space and noise make this an attractive proposition.

I’ll just say one last thing about the speed of Puppy; on my virtualised copy of Puppy 5.01, AbiWord, Gnumeric and Inkscape all load in about a second!

2). Ease of use : Puppy has got to be the easiest system to install since DOS 3.3

If anything, it’s got to be even easier to install than DOS!

Once installed, a simple wizard sets up networking and then, when you click on the Browse icon (for web browsing), you are offered a choice of browsers to install…..  Firefox, SeaMonkey, Chromium, Opera or Dillo.

That’s clever; that’s democratic, that’s sweet!

The icons are all labelled according to functionality rather than program name. And, whilst that might not make any difference to experienced users, it’s got to help “Great Aunt Edna” who may have come rather late in life to home computing.

3). Software : Just what you need…..

Earlier versions of Puppy (prior to 5.0 Lucid Puppy) came with a restricted set of installed and installable applictions.

I think that this was largely to ensure that those applications matched the Puppy ethos; small, fast and simple. Obviously, with a small team porting applications to the Puppy install format, these sorts of applications are going to take priority.

Now, however, (from the current version – Lucid Puppy) with the Ubuntu repository (or a subset of it – I haven’t quite been able to work that out yet) behing Puppy, there is a far larger range of tried and tested applications available.

The software available from the QuickPet installation icon on the desktop covers most bases though….

Amongst the applications available are Gimp, Songbird, Thunderbird, Dia and Foxit.  That pretty much covers all bases for me, or rather, my clients.

4). Stability :

I’ve been using Puppy (one version or another) since 2006. I’ve lent machines running Puppy to clients when I’va had to take their own PCs away for repair and I’ve installed Puppy on friends’ machines when they wanted a lightweight system just to do the basics. On my own machines I’ve had Puppy running for months without a reboot.

More often than not, I’ve had trouble getting my loan machines back; the clients are so impressed with the speed and functionality.

I’ve never had to respond to a support call on any of the loan machines or the systems I’ve installed on friends’ PCs.

Whatever I’ve thrown at it, I’ve never had Puppy lock up or let me down.

This is how an operating system should be! This puts many other operating systems (including some flavours of Linux, I’m sad to say) to shame.

5). Cost :

Obviously, Puppy, like all other Linuxes, is free.

The applications that come with it are also free. No news there.

Where Puppy really shows a cost saving is that it’s minimal hardware requirements allow one to reuse old equipment that would struggle with pretty much every other common operating system.

I’m running Pupppy on a 600MHz Celeron with 256 MB of Ram. These days I’d find it hard to buy a machine that slow. If I could find one, it’d only cost pennies!

I’ve started looking at very small Intel Atom powered desktop machines (commonly known as Net-tops, I believe) as a possible replacement for my server (I don’t really need a Xeon powered SCSI based machine that is realistically coming to the end of its life.)

If I get one, before installing a minimal Debian server configuration, I’ll certainly have a play around with Puppy on it.  I guess that Puppy will fly on a dual core atom with 1GB of Ram!

6). Interface :

Puppy has a menu where most Windows users would expect to find one; in the bottom left hand corner. The same menu is also accessible by right-clicking the mouse anywhere on the desktop. The large and clearly marked icons are well chosen to describe their function to people who prefer to launch their applictations that way.

The setup wizards assume no technical ability from the user; in this they far exceed those found on Microsoft systems.

The only changes to the loaner systems (that I lend to clients) that I make are to rename the hard drive from sda1 to Hard Drive; I can’t expect my clients to understand Linux drive naming conventions.

I also delete some of the icons for things like Mount, Install and Setup – I don’t really want my clients to be playing around with these things; why should they?

Finally, I create a desktop link to My Documents – that saves the clients from having to hunt around an unfamiliar file system to find their saved documents.

7). Customisation :

Which, I suppose, brings me to customisation. Even using the standard desktop (which uses the JWM Window Manager), there are 4 different sets of icons that can be used (although I like the standard icons well enough) and six different themes. Once again, the standard theme works fine for me.

For further customisation there are other window managers that can be installed; a quick look at the list shows LDXE, Gnome and KDE, amongst others, althogh I haven’t tried them yet.

8). Community :

There’s a lively and active Puppy forum at http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/ and most questions that you may have should have been already answered there.  A good place for a browse and to participate.

Another great resource is http://puppylinuxfaq.org/ where you can find answers to questions you hadn’t even thought about asking!

http://puppylinux.org/news/index.php is full of decent information and well worth a visit.

And finally, there is Barry Kauler’s website at http://www.puppylinux.com/ Barry created Puppy and deserves a visit.

Overall, the Puppy community is helpful and friendly.  There seems to be little or no snobby behaviour and even when certifiably stupid people like me ask silly questions, a friendly hand points them in the right direction.

Puppy fans tend to be very enthusiastic about their choice of operating system.  And, although I don’t use Puppy for my main operating system, I am happy to consider myself part of the Puppy community.

9). Simplicity :

In that it just works without any faffing around, Puppy is simplicity itself.

The few queries that I’ve had have been easy to resolve.

That my clients never have to ask me “how do I do this?” type questions says it all!

10). Fun :

I’ve got to admit that I always have a smile on my face when I use Puppy.

It’s partly because of the default desktop background with its large friendly icons but also because I know that everything is just going to work.

Puppy even comes with some games!  I’m not sure that this is a good idea (my copy of Mint 8.0 doesn’t have games pre-installed and I think I like this?)

I suppose that it is the lack of pretentiousness that’s part of the reason for that big smile on my face?

Summary

Looking back at what I’ve writting it does, I have to say, sound a little bit gushing.

But, I can’t apologise for that!

Puppy does exactly what it says on the tin; it is a simple, extraordinarily fast operating system that works perfectly as a live CD but is also quite happy to be installed onto your hard disk.

The standard installed applications do pretty much what most people need.

Should AbiWord not be man enough, Open Office Writer can be installed. Should you not like Sypheed as an email client, it is simplicity to install Thunderbird in its place.

So, you have a rock sold operating system that asks little in the way of hardware specifications; you have a system with an interface so simple that your Great Aunt Edna will be able to use it and with enough power that you’ll be able to catch up on work when you go and spend a weekend with the aforementioned great aunt!

Personally, I think that if Puppy were packaged in  an austere manner with confusingly named icons, us geeks would probably love it even more!

Perhaps that’s why Puppy isn’t installed on as many machines as it should be?

The people who don’t read the techie sites don’t know about it and the people who  are geeky enough to know about Puppy are probably put off by its simplicity and ease of use?

After all, what’s the point of being a geek if the operating system works fine, out of the box, and there’s no need to be geeky about anything?

All the best

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A couple of years ago, I was looking for an operating system for Chatwin and, after trying many others, came across Puppy Linux.

At first I thought that it was a joke, but then I investigated and found that that it wasn’t – far from it.

I’ll try to explain. Chatwin is a secondhand HP e-Vectra with a 600MHz processor and 256MB of RAM. She cost me all of 70 euros.

Nowadays, I wouldn’t be able to buy a machine with such a low spec but, if one did turn up in a yard sale, car boot sale or vide greniers (what we call a yard sale in France), I’d probably fork out 20 euros for one; 30 max!

In other words, she’s not a powerhouse. I bought her just so that I’d have another machine to do my writing on – a machine that didn’t have email and internet on, so I wouldn’t be distracted.

I realised that with her low spec, she wouldn’t be a screamer but I was also aware that there were a number of cutdown versions of Linux that I could try.

If all else failed, I had an old copy of Windows 98 which would work (although I really didn’t want to have to admit failure and use that).

I started off by downloading DSL-N. This is a larger version of Damn Small Linux which many people have raved about – sadly, I’m not one of them. It just didn’t deliver the goods for me.

I then tried a number of live distros but these all used KDE as a window manager and that took up too much of the limited memory.

I even installed Free BSD but had trouble getting a window manager to work – perhaps I should have persevered but….  life’s too short!

Finally, I downloaded a copy of the basic Debian distribution – I knew that I could make this work. It would have worked, as well, had I not been distracted by something that I stumbled upon on the internet – a review of Puppy Linux.

Puppy Linux is it!

I downloaded the CD image – it came to 72MB.

That’s right, an operating system with all the applications you are ever going to need for a basic home PC in 72MB. I cut a CD and booted Chatwin up. I couldn’t believe it – even running from a liveCD, Chatwin had been transformed from the 6 year old, 70 euro secondhand machine to the fastest machine that I had ever used (or seen).

I started looking round at what you get with Puppy.

Abiword – the word processor that, at the time,  I used out of preference
Gnumeric – a useable spreadsheet
SeaMonkey – the Mozilla internet suite that handles browsing, email, newsgroups and web design. It also has an address book
Geany – a powerful text editor that I tried to learn to like (or, at least, learn to use)

And a host of small applications to provide internet connectivity, network connectivity, drawing, playing music and videos and loads of other stuff that I just never got round to playing with.

In other words, everything that I needed.

It also had a set of wizards that were so simple, I couldn’t believe that they were working.

They were though, and I set up my soundcard and network connectivity faster and easier than any other operating system that I have ever used.

How Puppy works

When you boot up off the CD, Puppy loads itself into RAM.

That’s why it’s do fast! It stores any changes you make in RAM until you log out. Then you are prompted to save to a file on your hard disk.

As long as you have space, it doesn’t matter what Operating System you are using (I believe that there are some difficulties with NTFS but there are workarounds as well.

Running Puppy off a CD is the standard way of doing things – even the developer works this way.

However, I decided to install it to my hard disk. It installed in about 5 minutes – compare that with Windows 98 (don’t even think about XP). It took another few minutes to set up networking and getting the soundcard working. After that, it has worked without any problems at all.

All the questions it asks when installing (or booting up from the CD) are simple to answer – even for a newcomer to PCs.

Its wizards and clear interface make it the ideal operating system for the most nervous of users.

What is interesting, though, is that so many power users are getting interested in it, as well. It’s the speed, you see.

What don’t I like about Puppy Linux

Umm…. I’m going to have to think about that – there must be something.

The interface

The interface is very clear and sensible. Thus, nice big icons which are sensibly labelled – Email is just that, not Outlook or Thunderbird; Wordprocessing is Write, not Abiword.

This has got to help new users. I, however, am not a new user and I prefer a more austere desktop. No problem there, there are other window managers that I can download and use. There are other icon sets, as well.

Even if it doesn’t suit me, I do have to say that the standard interface is better than anything Microsoft has ever created.

Running as root

With Linux (and Unix) systems, there is a privilleged user known as root. Root has power to do anything. Normally it is not a good idea to run as root.

With Puppy Linux, you don’t have any choice. However, having thought about this, I understand why.

If you are running off a live CD, you can’t delete any system files – they’re on the CD.

By not having multiple logins, Puppy doesn’t carry the weight of other systems and is thus, so fast.

Nothing major, it just goes against the grain to run as root – for me, at least.

It’s so fast!

Yes, I’m bitter about this. I’m bitter that I spent so much money on Mozart (my main machine) only to see it being trounced in speed stakes by something that cost a tenth of the price.

I bet that Microsoft are bitter, as well. I believe that, if someone brought out a supported version of Puppy Linux, they would clean up as all those Windows XP, non-power users are forced to upgrade both hardware and software, just so they can run Vista or Win7.

To the present day. Part 2….

I’ve persevered with Puppy since that very first day: I worked my way through various flavours from version 2.0 right up to the current 5.0 Lucid Puppy.

They’ve all worked find.

Puppy 5.0 however, is the icing on the cake!

Apart from all the great features that have present for the last four years, the Ubuntu Lucid repository (or maybe part of it?) is available for application downloads. I’m not sure if the whole repository is available because although I was able to install Nautilus and Gedit, I couldn’t find any reference to PyRoom.

More investigation on my part is required there.

Thunderbird, however, installed fine from the QuickPet application installer.

Summary

Puppy will run upon pretty much anything out there.

It gives you a blisteringly fast machine with a sensible selection of pre-installed applications.

If you need more choice of applications, it’s there with the integration of the Ubuntu repository.

You can run it perfectly well from the CD; perhaps using a USB key to hold your data files and to back up your configuration (when you log out, you’ll be asked if you want your configuration saved.)

This makes it the perfect machine independent Linux distribution that will run on any machine you can find.

You can, as I do, install to the hard drive,  this doesn’t really improve performance; it just seems a tidier way for me to do things.

I’m going to write some more (maybe next week) about the 10 Reasons to Love Puppy but I hope that this little introduction has been interesting enough for you to try a download of Lucid Puppy 5.0 and give it a go.

All the best

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A History Trip….

Can you remember way back in the depths of time when Firefox was version 1.5 and was really the only alternative to Internet Explorer apart from Opera (which would have been moving from the advert displaying version to the non-advert displaying version at around about that time if my memory is not misleading me) and Ubuntu hadn’t taken off and Netbooks didn’t exist unless, like me, you were sad enough to remember the Toshiba Libretto (great machine, by the way!)

I guess we’re talking about the back-end of 2005 because it was then that I was given an old laptop and my three years of not owning a PC came to an end.

I ran Windows NT on that laptop – I think it only had 128MB of ram so I was limited in my OS choice. I’d have loved to run Linux but the internal modem wouldn’t work with any of the distributions that I tried and so, unhappily, I gave up. Internet Explorer ran like a pig on the laptop and I used a combination of Opera and Firefox depending on my whim.

In February 2006 I bought a “proper computer” and immediately wiped the French installation of XP and installed Suse Linux. I imagine that Firefox was the default browser with Suse; to be honest, I can’t remember. I do know that since then, the only times I have used Internet Explorer have been on client’s machines (and I always try to encourage that they see the light and change to FireFox) or on the virtualised test environments that I need to maintain purely for website testing purposes.

Four Things that were good about Firefox.

1).  It was nice to feel smug about having a more secure browser.  I’ll admit it, I enjoyed being able to be smug when in the presence of IE users.

2).  The extensions.  You could customise your Firefox just as you might customise a car or re-decorate a house.  But, it cost you nothing!

3).  Tabbed browsing!  How did we ever cope before tabbed browsing.  Actually, I do have one memory of being at work in London and having 20 or so instances of IE loaded and spending weeks (perhaps I exaggerate slightly) trying to find the right one.

4).  It was also nice to know that Microsoft (or any other evil empire, for that matter) wasn’t getting any money for the browser you were running.

Five things that went wrong with Firefox.

1).  Code bloat?  I’ve not actually looked at the code that goes to make up Firefox but I’ll be my bottom dollar (not that I have any dollars, bottom or top) that it’s grown exponentially since those early days.  It’s a sad fact that code bases do get out of control.  In fact, wasn’t that what happened to Netscape’s Mozilla Suite that got transformed into Firefox?  Or am I getting my history wrong?

2).  Too many extensions?  I know that we don’t have to install them all but, the sheer range of extensions was a great temptation, wasn’t it?

3).  Resources hog?  Sort of ties in with code bloat; I’d see Firefox use up to 500 MB of RAM on my machine.  Just so it could display some HTML, display a few images and perhaps run some javascript or flash?

4). Speed?  Sorry but if I have to wait for the program to load; if it takes time to change focus from one tab to another, I’m going to get annoyed.  By the time I changed from Firefox to Chrome I was getting annoyed an awful lot of the time.

5). Screen area.  Just switching from Chrome to Firefox during a working session shows how much larger Chrome feels.

Too good, to start with!

Of course, when Chrome came along I wasn’t too impressed. I had to run it on a Windows machine, it had a strange minimalistic interface and, worst of all, it would display all the errors in my html!

Back then I was hand coding my sites (they were all static; I’d yet to discover WordPress!) and on one site I had about 100 pages, all copied from the same template – a template where every <h2> was terminated with a </h3>!

Unfortunately there were valid <h3></h3> pairings so I couldn’t just do a global search and replace.

The work involved in sorting out my own silly mistake made me dislike Chrome intensely!

However, if I’d coded properly in the first place……

And what was Firefox and IE doing letting me get away with badly coded HTML?

I kept reading about how fast it was and, at the same time, started to realise how slow my Firefox installation was becoming.

I do have to admit that I was running about ten million extensions (perhaps I exaggerate slightly) which can’t have helped.

It was in November 2009 that I realised that I’d have to do something.

I’d just started A Taste of Garlic (a blog review site) and the way I work when I’m writing posts for that site is to have lots (and I mean lots) of tabs open at the same time.  This would cause FireFox to grind to a halt.

I bit the bullet and, as soon as the Beta version for Linux was announced in December 2009, I installed it and started using it for 90% of my web development tasks.

Extensions

Of course, I still needed Firefox for the functionality that wasn’t available in Chrome at the time.  I’m mainly thinking screenshots here.  Thus I would keep a copy of Firefox running so that I could use the Screengrab extension.  Also, I use Photoxpress.com for their free photo stock (you can get 10 photos a day free of charge) but the “I have read the terms and conditions” button didn’t show up in Chrome until 5.0.

But, a few months ago, with the release of version 5.0 of Chrome, I found that all the really must have extensions were available for me to install.

Please bear in mind that I now no longer consider that it is vital to have an extension to show me my adsense earnings or to display my IP address.  I can always find those things out, if I want to know.

I also have learned to live without coloured tabs.  I’m not too sure how I ever managed to cope without tab pinning though – that really has changed the way I work!

With Firefox you can get pinned tabs but you need to install an extension to get them.  With Chrome, they’re there by default.

I also prefer the way that Chrome handles history but, I’m buggered if I can explain why?  I should mention that I didn’t like it at first but it now seems natural.  Perhaps I’ve adjusted or perhaps it is the right way and I was just slow to see it?

The extensions that I do use are as follows….

Awesome Screenshot: Capture & Annotate - Version: 1.2.4

Color Pick - Version: 0.0.1.16

MeasureIt! - Version: 1.1.2

Pendule - Version: 0.0.10

RGB/HEX Color Generator - Version: 1.0.1

Of those I could probably lose Color Pick and RGB/HEX Color Generator as I have other tools that can do that for me.

So, not very many extensions.  Is that because I actually didn’t really need all the extensions that I used to run under Firefox or is it because Chrome just does so many things right, out of the box?

Conclusion…

For me, I’m as happy as I was back in the day when I moved from Internet Explorer to FireFox.  I’m determined not to install the Must Have extensions as I did with FireFox.

There are still some things that annoy me but these are so minor that I’m probably just being picky?

For example, I don’t like the bar that appears at the bottom of the screen when you download a file.  That can’t be changed.  I know when I download something and would prefer to have an additional dialogue box that I could load should I need to check on the progress of the download.

I also find that occasionally, I lose the icon graphics whilst working in WordPress.  This doesn’t matter a great deal as I know what each icon does (and I do most of my WordPress work separately in a text editor anyway) but, it’s a little niggle.  It only happens after a long session with loads of tabs open anyway and the answer is to close Chrome and start again.

I could also use a way of bookmarking all open tabs; that may be possible but, if it is, I haven’t found out how to do  it yet.

But, over all, I’m happy with Chrome.

I tend to use a web browser for upwards of 10 hours a day; for work, for work, for work and, occasionally, for pleasure.

It’s vital to me that the browser works well and in the way that I want it to work.

For me, Chrome does just that, for most of the time.

I prefer the interface (now that I’m used to it) and Firefox now seems clunky and overburdened with menus by comparison.

I find that, just as I was a Firefox evangelist a few short years ago, I’m now encouraging people to change to Chrome.

I’m pretty sure that I’ll stick with Chrome, until, of course, something better comes along – perhaps FireFox light?  Perhaps Safari?  I’m not sure.  What I do know is that we have moved on from those days when most of us could only run IE6 or Firefox 1.5.

Is Chrome is the new Firefox?  Maybe?

Are Browsers are now better than ever before?  Definitely!

All the best

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If your business relies on your access to email and the internet, think how devastated you’d be should that access be removed.

With this article I shall attempt to identify the risks and suggest possible strategies to minimise any risk to your data or your ability to continue with your business without interruption or inconvenience to you or your clients.

What are the risks?

Hardware failure

Let me tell you a secret. Every hard disk that has ever been built is going to fail! Every single one. The hard disk in the machine that you are using now is going to fail one day (hopefully, not today!) The hard disks in the servers at your bank are going to fail (don’t worry, your bank’s IT department also knows that and they have taken precautions – I hope).

Modern hard disks are very reliable but anything that contains disks spinning at 7,200 RPM (or faster) is going to have problems, sooner or later. Every time you switch off your PC, it cools down. Every time you switch it on, it heats up. If you heat metal and then cool it, repeatedly, it changes.

You may be lucky, I hope you are. You may never suffer a hard disk failure but please be aware that it is something that is just waiting to happen.

In the corporate environment, hard disk failures are taken into account. Big companies (and many small ones, as well) use Raid arrays of multiple hard disks so that if one fails, no data gets lost and the users are not aware of the problem.

Take it from me – one day your hard drive will fail and all the data on it will be lost.

But hey, even if you never see any problems with your hard drive, your PC is still at risk from Power Supply failure, keyboard failure (and who hasn’t spilt a cup of coffee over their keyboard – or am I just clumsy?).

How would you cope with hardware failure?

Software failure

Modern software does an incredible job. However, the complexity that makes it so useful to us, comes at its own price.

We require our Operating Systems to seamlessly allow us to surf the net, play games, watch videos from YouTube and still be reliable enough to manage our accounts systems.

Our always on internet connectivity puts us at risk from Virus infection, Trojans and SpamBots.

Yet, even with the amazing reliability of modern software – it sometimes goes wrong.

If your software crashes and mangles all the data on your hard drive, could you go back to the un-mangled software that existed 1 hour ago?

Human error

Yes, we’re human, we make mistakes. We sometimes delete a file that we don’t mean to. We sometimes amend a file and then find out that was a mistake.

I write fiction. Often I find that I have done something that, later, turns out to be a mistake. Let’s say, for example, I kill off Joe (one of my characters) and then, a week later, decide that I need him to rescue Jenny (another character) at the last minute from almost certain death – I’ll need to resurrect Joe. I’ll need to go back and find that old copy of the manuscript (you know, the one where Joe was still breathing and hadn’t yet been killed off). If I haven’t backed up – that’ll be difficult to do.

If you delete or overwrite an important file, could you recover it?

Theft

One day, and I hope that day never comes, you may lose your PC. How? Well, in the best case, Billy the Burglar may pay you a visit. He might take a fancy to your PC. If that is the case, you not only lose all your data but, someone else has your data, as well. Data security is another story but if, like me, you have all your life on your PC, how would you feel is you lose it?

It’s all very well to back up to an external hard drive but wouldn’t Billy the Burglar take that as well?

Could you survive a visit from BILLY THE BURGLAR?

Fire, Flood and Other Disasters

Of course, even if your hard drive doesn’t die on you, if your software doesn’t crash and destroy all your data, if you don’t make some silly mistake and wipe your vital documents and if Billy the Burglar doesn’t steal your computer – there’s always fire, flood and alien abduction to take into account!

Seriously; a burst water main, a small kitchen fire, a ceiling falling in (all of the preceding occurring with out any harm being suffered by anyone!), could ruin your computer.

What would you do if aliens abduct your computer?

So, stop with the pessimism!

Perhaps it seems that I’m being over pessimistic – after all, the data on your computer might not be important to you. Being able to continue trading after an disaster might not be of any interest. Hey, if you lose clients (current or future) because of an IT problem, there’s always unemployment benefits and social security payments to look forward to. Isn’t that right?

If your business relies on your access to email and the internet, think how devastated you’d be should that access be removed.

I’m going to take a quick look at possible solutions to a number of Disaster scenarios – perhaps one or more may be useful to you?

What are the solutions?

Hardware failure

Starting with hard disk failure, the obvious solution is to back up to second hard drive. This could be internal, external or in a different machine. I shall take a quick look at the benefits and drawbacks of each of these options.

1). Installing a second hard drive in your Computer :- This is probably the cheapest option.

You would need to set up a regular copy job to sync data from Drive 1 to Drive 2.

The easiest way to do this would be to use RSYNC – for details on how to use this utility, take a look at www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

Windows users should take a look here… http://www.gaztronics.net/rsync.php

This would be the fastest (in terms of data transfer rates for backup and restores) but recovering from a failed primary hard drive would still require replacement/repair of the original hard drive with possibily a re-installation of the operating system.

This solution would not protect against hardware failure of other components (such as power supply/memory.)

My advice would be to re-use that spare old hard drive in this way (rather than leave it to get dusty in that box on the top of the cupboard) but, this should not be the mainstay of your Business Continuity planning.

2). Backing up to an external USB Drive :- This is probably the easiest option.

I use this as part of my backup strategy (for more details, please take a look at www.kmeckstein.com – my personal IT site where I explain my philosophy of keeping IT simple.)

Although data transfer rates are not particularly high, this is a simple solution to backing up the data portion of your hard drive. A catastophic hard disk failure will require replacement and/or repair of your hard drive prior to the re-installation of your applications and data; as with option 1). this should be considered a Disaster Recovery strategy rather than a Business Contiuity one.

3). Backing up to a Server :- This option shares much in common with option 2.

I am using this as part of my Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery planning. I back my workstations up to a server and then back the server up to an external USB drive. Please not that, whilst this might seem to be the ideal solution, it does not protect from natural disaster (such as fire or flood) or un-natural disaster (such as a visit from Billy the Burglar.)

4). Backing up to a Web Server :- This option seems to be the ideal solution.

However, although I use this option in various forms, bandwidth restrictions reduce it’s usefulness to me. This one might work for you is you are sitting at the end of a high speed internet connection.

5). Backing up to CD/DVD :- This option should be part of your regular backup process.

Even a weekly backup to DVD won’t cost too much – the trick is to identify your vital data and get into the habit of backing it up on a regular basis.

My advice…

To be absolutely honest, none of the above will provide you with complete Business Continuity should you suffer a hardware failure.

My advice would be to use whichever of the above is appropriate in conjuction with…..

6). Backing up to another live PC :- This option is the obvious one (at least to my jaded eyes!)

Not only do you have a copy of your data in another place, if that data is on another working PC (with all your applications already installed), and your main PC dies; all you need to do is cross the room and sit down at the live spare machine.

You can be up and running in minutes, if not seconds. Now, that’s what I call real Business Continuity!

What do you need to implement this strategy? Just a spare PC, configured with all your vital apps, connected to your network and a backup script that copies over your data from your main PC overnight and also, during the day, should you require an interim backup (perhaps during lunchbreak after a hard morning’s work?)

Software failure

If your software crashes and mangles all the data on your hard drive, could you go back to the un-mangled software that existed 1 hour ago?

As long as you are backing up your data, you stand a chance of recovering from a fatal software error.

By having a replacement machine, pre-configured with all your software and waiting in the corner of the office, the amount of time that you spend recovering from a major software error is minimised.

You should consider what software you are using for each specific task and then, ask yourself if that software is appropriate. Whilst I’m not going to tell you that Spreadsheets are evil!, I have seen, so many many times, spreadsheets being used to perform the tasks that should really be managed by databases or financial recording packages. If you are using the right software for the job, it is less likely to go wrong and let you down!

You should also ask yourself whether it is the time to change your software to free Open Source software such as Open Office/GnuCash/MySQL?

Open Source software is free, so there are no cost restraints to having that spare PC hidden under the desk.

Human error

If you delete or overwrite an important file, could you recover it?

As with recovering from software errors, a strong backup policy will also get you out of trouble if you tosh things up yourself.

Theft

Could you survive a visit from BILLY THE BURGLAR?

So, you gone back to the UK to visit some relatives; you’ve told half the world on Facebook and Billy the Burglar comes to visit.

Now, Billy is really only interested in high value items so; yes, he takes your TV, he takes your Hi-Fi and yes, he’s going to love your computers.

Even if you’ve backed them up to an external USB drive, the odds are that Billy will want to take that as well!

Fire, Flood and Other Disasters

What would you do if aliens abduct your computer?

Well, I think that we can discount the alien threat but, we should all bear in mind the risks of fire and water damage.

This is where having a decent offsite Disaster Recovery strategy comes in handy.

OK, I’m convinced – what do I do?

OK – you’re either convinced that it’ll never happen to you, you’re actually not that interested in ensure that you can continue trading following an IT problem (in which case you’re probably not even reading this but… I’ll buy you a coffee the next time I’m passing the Job Centre.)

If you’ve made it this far and are starting to wonder how much you’d lose by

(i) not being able to confirm that Gite booking before the potential client goes elsewhere,
(ii) not responding to that email enquiry (and thus, potential client figures you’re not very motivating and decides to give the contract to your competitor), or
(iii) not being able to bill those people who’s work details you’ve been logging on a spreadsheet on that PC that’s just crashed/blownup/been nicked/been abducted by aliens!

So, now that we’ve looked at what can go wrong and what we can to survive an IT outage, what are the next steps?

Not all of what I detail on these pages will be relevant to everyone. What I shall attempt to do is to look at some of the ways that we can protect ourselves against what I am going to call… Business Loss. Why Business Loss? Well, we should be looking at IT failure as just that; a loss of trading ability, an opportunity for our competitors to beat us to new business or a chance to embarrass ourselves in front of current or potential clients.

Putting things into perspective.

If you are a Gardener and your lawnmower breaks down, gets stolen, bursts into flames or gets abducted by aliens – YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BE BE TO CUT LAWNS!

Unless, or course, you have a spare lawnmower.

It’s the same if your IT fails.

This is where we build a spare lawnmower.

How do we protect against business loss?

Identify your data

Well, the first thing is to decide what data is important to you and where it lives. I don’t like to think of the people I’ve visited in order to help them recover from PC problems only to find that their backups weren’t happening, or worse, the data they were backing up wasn’t the data they needed to back up.

1). Email

If your mail comes via Gmail or Hotmail, it is on a server on the internet (in fact it is on a number of servers on the internet), and you don’t need to back it up – right?

Sure…

• If you can trust your mail supplier never to have a glitch (they all do, even the mighty Gmail!)
• If you can trust yourself not to accidently delete that mail that you realise you actually need – the next day (we’ve all done it – we’re human and humans make errors!)
• If you can be sure that your internet connection is always going to work (God bless France Telecom!)

Better be safe – better make sure – hey?

This diagram shows what basically happens for me.

• POP3 (webmail) gets downloaded every 10 minutes from my accounts at Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc. to the Thunderbird mail client on my PC. Thunderbird is a free, Open Source mail client that handles multiple accounts without any problem and is easy to backup and manage – it’s easy to use, as well!

• At 2am every day, my PC (all of my PCs get backed up in the same manner), gets backed up to my server. My server is just an old PC that runs a simplified version of the Linux software that I use on my main machine. It has a screen and keyboard but it doesn’t really need one.

• At 3am every day, the Server itself gets backed up to the USB drive and also to A-Drive (an online free backup facility.)

• What the diagram doesn’t show are the weekly backups to DVD.

• What also isn’t shwon is the actual mechanics of the backup process. I have written a script that maintains the last 10 days copies of my mail on my hard disk (and, of course, backed up toi the server), so that if I realise I now need a copy of a mail I deleted 3 days ago, I can easily get to it by looking at the relevant backup.

2). Web

I don’t know about you but, my installation of Firefox is very personal to me. I have bookmarks set up just so and the right (for me), mixture of extensions and addons. I’d hate to lose it all. Thus, my Firefox configuration gets backed up every night, in exactly the same way as my email.

3). Financials

My static financial data mainly consists of a number of spreadsheets on my main PC (the live data lives on a LAMP server which is backed up to my data server every night.)

This gets backed up in the same way as my mail, with one major difference…. It also gets zipped up and automatically emailed to a Gmail account (the address is a secret but think of something like financial.keckstein@gmail.com)

4). Business

In exactly the same way as my financial data, my business data is backed up to the server (just as my email is) and also zipped and emailed to a Gmail account.

5). Personal

My personal stuff gets backed up but, to be honest, if I lost it all I could still continue to work – so, is it that important?

I’m talking of things like photos, music, videos. If I lose them, they can always be replaced. They don’t get backed up to the A-Drive offsite server.

Instead I rely on the weekly backup DVDs to do the trick.

For personal photos, you can always use the services of Photobucket (or similar) to put a copy online.

Putting it into practise

1). Backup your data to another machine on a daily basis.

Use that old PC as a backup server. Make sure that it can also operate as a workstation so that when your PC dies, you can move to the server and carry on working.

If you haven’t got an old PC lying around, buy a second hand one – decent kit can be had for pennies these days.

2). Now backup your server to a USB drive on a daily basis.

If you need to get to yesterday’s data, better make sure that data is backed up as well. A decent sized USB hard drive costs about 100€ now – how much would a lost job/contract cost?

3). Backup the core data to an offline server on a daily basis.

You can use A-Drive (or similar) for this, or you can create an account at Gmail and use them. Why not do what I do and use both?

4). Ensure that you have installation CDs for your software.

Don’t rely on being able to download the software you need from the internet – if you can’t re-install your operating system following a crash, how are you going to get on the internet?

5). Backup everything to DVD once a week.

Ensure that you don’t lose your personal data by backing it up to DVD once a week and keeping those DVDs somewhere safe.

Make sure that your photos are stored online on a service like Photobucket.

OK, I’m convinced – what do I do?

If you would like to discuss how to put any of this into action, please feel free to get in touch with me. Although I earn a living by doing this computer stuff, there’s no charge for a chat (phone or email.)

If you want me to take a look at how I can help you implement a complete Disaster Recover and Business Continuity Plan, by all means, give me a call. I bet it’ll cost less that the real cost of losing your IT.

My contact details can be found here… http://www.kmeckstein.com/contact

All the best

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However, for contingency’s sake, it is sometimes nice to have a graphical environment; I’ll explain why later on.

The following article is to detail how I build the base server using Debian Linux.

I don’t intend it to be a comprehensive quide to installing a Linux server – it’s just an explanation of how I choose to do it.

If you feel that I’m doing something wrong (or missing out something that might help me), please free to let me know.

Hardware

I have tested the installation of Debian on a number of machines ranging from a 600Mhz Celeron with 256Mb of Ram and a 9Gb IDE hard drive upto a 2.8Ghz Xeon with 2Gb of Ram and a 72Gb SCSI hard drive.

The only vital component of the installation machine is that it has a working network card/interface and a CD Drive. You will need a keyboard and screen for the installation process but, once the machine is up and running, these are not required.

Installation

(1). You need to start off by getting a Debian netinst CD. This can be downloaded from here… debian – 5.0 – netinst-  this image is 150MB and will work on all Intel or AMD machines. For other versions you will have to visit www.debian.org Once you have burnt a copy of the CD, pop it into the installation machine and reboot that machine. Once the machine has booted up from the CD it will display this screen – I suggest that you choose the default option of Install – the non-graphical installer really isn’t that frightening and getting used to a non-windowed environment be good practise anyway.

(2). Then choose your language. For obvious reasons, I choose English.

(3). When it comes to localisation details, I choose United Kingdom (I should really chose France as that’s where I now live but, France is not on the initial menu and thus, it doesn’t get my vote – how lazy is that?)

(4). Choose the keyboard layout that matches your keyboard.

(5). The PC will whirl away for a few moments whilst the hardware is being scanned. The network card will be found and if you have a DHCP server (an ADSL modem generally works as a DHCP server), will assign an IP address to it.

(6). And then you will be asked for the hostname (the name that you are going to give the machine.) At this point we need to go back a stage as we really don’t want a DHCP assigned IP address for this machine. Tab twice and press Enter.

(7). Choose to Configure Network Manually (it should be the default) and press Enter.

(8). Now we are going to enter the IP address manually. All the ADSL modems that I have seen (LiveBox, DLink, NetGear & Linksys) use a default internal IP address of 192.168.1.1 – thus we are going to take the next available address – 192.168.1.2 If your ADSL modem/router uses a different IP address or 192.168.1.2 is already taken, you will need to specify a different IP address here. The important thing is that we need a fixed IP address in the same range as the one that your ADSL modem uses (i.e. for a modem using 192.168.1.1 we should use a fixed IP address between 192.168.1.2 and 192.168.1.254) Type this into the space provided and press Enter.

(9). The installation program will work out the best network mask for you so just press Enter here.

(10). The installation program will guess that the Network Gatway has an IP address of 192.168.1.1 (the address of your ADSL modem – effectively your Gateway to the internet) so, if this is right, just press Enter here.

(11). Like above, the installation program guesses that your Gateway is either your Name server or has the address of it so, if this is right, just press Enter.

(12). Now we can name the machine. I am naming my machine server01. You can name your machine whatever you like.

(13). Now you should enter the domain name. Unless you are building a machine to insert in an existing domain you may use any name. It probably makes sense to name the domain something like mydomain as I do.

(14). The machine will chug away for a little bit.

(15). As this machine is going to be a dedicated server, I am going to use the whole hard disk.

(16). There’s only one disk in the machine so I select it.

(17). I’m going to allow the disk to be partitioned with all files in one partition. For this machine there really isn’t much point in doing otherwise.

(18). The installation program decides to create an 8.2Gb root partition and a 419 Mb swap partition. This is fine so I just press Enter to allow the system to Finish Partitioning and Write Changes to Disk.

(19). Backspace to choose Yes if you’re are really sure.

(20). The installation process now creates the partitions on your hard drive.

(21). And starts installing packages from the CD Rom.

(22). When it has done this you will be asked for a password for the system administrative account.

(23). And you will be asked to repeat it.

(24). You will now be asked for the name of a user. As this machine is going to be a server without any regular user, I am going to create a user called administrator.

(25). Whatever name you have typed in, it may get altered – in this case it didn’t. Press Enter to accept the new user account name.

(26). You will be asked for a password for the new account.

(27). And asked to repeat it.

(28). Once again, you will be asked where you are.

(29). And you’ll be asked to choose a Debian Archive Mirror.

(30). And finally, you’ll be asked if you are behind a HTTP proxy and if so, what the addresss of it is. Leave this blank unless you are sure you are behind a HTTP proxy and press Enter.

(31). This part of the installation takes about 20 minutes for me. It may be quicker for you (or longer, even), depending on the speed of your internet connection and the specification of your machine.

(32). There are some points where it looks as if it has got stuck. But, if you leave it alone, eventually it will carry on.

(33). You will be asked if you wish to Participate in a popularity contest? I generally answer no.

(34). You will be asked to Choose software to install Deselect all, highlight Continue and press Enter

(35). Next, the installation process asks if we want toInstall Grub to Master Boot Record – Yes, we most certainly do.

(36). The installation chugs away a little bit longer.

(37). And then the CD gets ejected and the machine will reboot. Type su and press Enter. Supply the root password when prompted and then type apt-get install openssh-server – and answer yes when prompted. Don’t forget to log yourself out of the machine by typing exit (twice)

A Graphical Interface

I install xfce once I have finished my standard server install of… Debian (with no options) and SSH.

The XFCE install is fairly trivial.

su

apt-get install xorg

apt-get install xfce4

apt-get install xfce4-goodies

Why a Graphical Interface?

Now, putting a desktop on two of my servers might make me a bit of a wimp but there are good reasons for it.

Firstly, if I am out and about on my Computer Repair business - www.KeithEckstein.com and I need something done on one of the servers, I could phone home and talk Jill through doing it if they have an environment that she is used to.

I hate to think how painful it would be trying to explain all the command line stuff when, to be honest, I need to type man for help at least once a day!

Also,  the server acts as a backup data server for the network.

If any machine on the network goes down, it is quite trivial to install ThunderBird or Firefox and thus, continue working without interruption.

The edict that “Thou shalt not have X Windows on a server” is all very well for older (or more stressed) kit or, outside of a home network (for security reasons).

The three things that have occurred to me during the process are….
1). Backups are one thing – Business Continuity is far more important!
2). A minimal XFCE install over Debian Server makes for a very fast machine and…
3). A combination of Webmin and SSH means that we can switch off those monitors, save space and save electricity as well!

A machine of the same sort of specification as, with a screen, would cost me about 100 euros from a local PC refurbisher.

About what a 500GB USB hard drive would cost. Now my server only has an 72GB hard drive but, she is a machine in her own right – perhaps we should start thinking less about backing up our data and more about continuing to use that data when things go wrong?

Perhaps we should all have a server like mine chugging away under our desks, being backed up to every night and just waiting for the day when our main machine decides to go wrong – at least that way, we could get onto the web and email an order in for kit to replace what has died?

All the best

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