Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, April 26, 2021.
What are your reasonable options for backing up a 16TB NAS in 2021?
External Hard Drive?
Pros:
Interface Portability: You do not need any new software or hardware.
Ability to reuse older hardware: Assuming you have a used drive large enough
to hold all your backups.
Cons:
Interface instability: USB3 drives especially are bad at this. The adapters
are usually not designed to handle the multiple hours of uptime necessary to
complete backing up multiple terabytes of data.
Transfer speeds: Most USB3 drives are not designed for performance. Even
custom enclosures with reasonable drives in them usually struggle to keep a
sustained write speed of 100MB/s.
Tape?
Pros:
Very reliable: Most tapes will probably outlast the drives that created them.
Cons:
Expensive: LTO-4 drives are several grand apiece, including used models. LTO-5
or LTO-6 is even more expensive, and LTO-5 or LTO-6 will be needed for most
people with a NAS.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Thursday, October 8, 2020.
I missed the fifth two weeks outright and only got a few articles in during the
fourth two weeks. Adjusting over to my new job has been difficult. A lack of
non political topics really hasn’t helped either.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Tuesday, September 22, 2020.
I discussed migrating from Google Analytics
and Jetpack to Matomo in a
previous post. Though I haven’t used it for a significant amount of time I am
finding it very useful.
There are two ways you can self-host Matomo. As a plugin for WordPress or as
an independent web application. The WordPress plugin is the most accessible
and most straightforward option for analytics on one WordPress installation.
However, if you administer more than one website, the dedicated web application
is a better option.
The only real difficulty I ran into was getting GeoIP working. That is due
primarily to a lack of Debian packages for the correct PHP extension and no
clear subheadings for system managed updates of the GeoIP databases.
#Assuming Matomo installed at /var/www/html/matomo#Assuming geoipupdate places the databases in /usr/share/GeoIP/cd /var/www/html/matomo/misc/
for DB in `ls /usr/share/GeoIP/*.mmdb`doln -s /usr/share/GeoIP/$DB ./
done#All .mmdb databases are now linked to the system databases updated by geoipupdate.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, September 21, 2020.
I spent last week working on passing my Life Provider exam for Oklahoma. I
have now passed it. It will take another week to get my license but I will be a
licensed life insurance agent soon.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, September 14, 2020.
After doing some research on alternative analytics options, I have removed
Jetpack. Matomo can do
everything Google Analytics and Jetpack can
without any third party data sharing.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Friday, September 11, 2020.
I use SSH keys to protect all of my SSH logins. The following shell code starts
only one ssh-agent and adds all ssh-keys to that agent. I recommend adding it
to your ~/.bashrc file, so the proper environment variables are set up.
if [ `ps -C ssh-agent | wc -l` -ne 2 ]; then ssh-agent -a $HOME/.ssh/agent.sock > $HOME/.ssh/agent.env
source$HOME/.ssh/agent.env
for key in $HOME/.ssh/*.pub; dopkey=`basename -s .pub $key` ssh-add $HOME/.ssh/$pkeydonefi
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Thursday, September 10, 2020.
For these last two weeks, I have posted eight days out of ten applicable days.
I am running out of ideas that don’t involve politics, and training for my
new job has impacted my free time. Most of the problem is finding nonpolitical
topics.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Friday, September 4, 2020.
A day or two after I posted my complaint about businesses not training
employees,
I accepted an offer at a company that does train their employees. Yay. I am not
sure how it is going to affect my post rate here though.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Thursday, September 3, 2020.
WordPress and several other pieces of web software written in PHP are notorious
for using old and broken algorithms for securing passwords. If you are using
a PHP version of 5.5 or newer, you should get okay security by default.
However, even phpass’ developers recommend not using their software if you
can use PHP 5.5 or newer. I strongly suggest installing and enabling the
PHP Native password hash plugin,
especially if your WordPress install was ever run on any of the PHP 5 family.
The plugin’s two most significant advantages are it actually gets updated to
include new, more robust algorithms, and it automatically migrates passwords to
the newer algorithms on login.