2009 Archives

Salty snapper

I used to call myself a sushitarian. That is, I loved to eat raw fish but didn't particularly like cooked fish. In San Francisco it was easy to assess oneself in this manner, with sushi bars on every 3rd corner of the city (including a nice one the very block we lived on). In New Zealand, however, sushi is not so abundant. So the other day at the waterfront farmer market when Lillian asked to get a fish from one of the boats that pulls up and sells its wares, I thought why not?

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Things that go bump in the night

Last night around 2:10am Minette and I were awakened by a big shake of the whole house. "Earthquake!" we said simultaneously. It was just one shock wave, quite strong but orderly. Thankfully the children slept through it. It's not uncommon to hear of analogies between Wellington and San Francisco, what with all the steep hills and large bay. Sitting on top of a major fault system is another similarity.

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Refinement of automount script for LUKS encrypted disk image

In my previous post I showed an automount script for mounting a LUKS encrypted disk image as a loop device. The script was designed to always mount the same loop device, e.g. /dev/loop0. This prevented it from being able to mount multiple disk images, so with some tweaks I refined the script to use any available loop device and thus support multiple disk images.

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Configuring automount for LUKS encrypted disk image on SMB share

In my previous post, I detailed how I set up an LUKS-encrypted filesystem on a loop device (a.k.a. sparse disk image file). To make automated backups easier and not have to add commands in my backup script to handle the mounting and unmounting of the disk image, I set up automount to:

1. Mount the SMB share when accessing the /cifs directory
2. Attach a loop device and set up LUKS filesystem access when accessing the /encrypted directory

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Encrypted Backup of RHEL 5 system to SMB network share

I purchased the LaCie NAS for backups of the various computers running around at home: a Mac desktop, a Mac laptop, and a Linux server. For the Macs they can just use Time Machine to backup to the NAS, which broadcasts itself as a Time Machine-capable server. For the Linux server, however, it's not so simple.

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Taming the LaCie 2big Network NAS

A little while ago I bought a LaCie 2big Network server to use for backups and storage. The drive is simple to use, but lacks the ability for the internal hard drives to "sleep" -- that is, spin down when not in use after a period of time. That's pretty annoying because the drive makes noise and wastes power while running, keeping the disks spinning. I decided I had to figure out a way to tame this little server.