ping

Has Crashplan crashed?

I’m pretty good with making sure I have backups, I have several external drives I use regularly. When I’ve gone away on holiday I usually get a friend to look after some of the external drives. I don’t just want to protect against hard disk break downs, I also want to make sure I can restore all my thousands of photos if the house burns down. But keeping a semi-recent off-site backup copy is not so easy, so when I discovered Crashplan recently, I thought I had found the solution. I would still have local backups, but a second line of defense would be Crashplan. Crashplan offer the first month free of charge, so I started it backing up my photos (40 GB). I also sold my family on the idea of a family subscription as the prices are pretty decent. Well, we shall see if this is indeed woth pursuing. Today the crashplan GUI showed me that the backup has stopped with another 2 days to go. The log file shows odd error messages such as “CrashPlan Central not ready for backup. Reason: The backup location is being moved” and “CrashPlan Central not ready for backup. Reason: The backup location is not accessible”. Searching the internet showed that some users had similar error messages back in February and apparently crashplan wasn’t terribly proactive. What may be even more scary is that their main website page is now also unavailable. This is a time when a company needs to use its Twitter  or Facebook account to tell its customers what is going on, but so far nothing. Crashplans promise to “Get your files securely – anytime, anywhere” would not be of great comfort right now if now was the time I wanted to perform a restore. I’ll look and see though, everyone can have IT challenges. What is important is a combination of speed with which the issues are resolved, and how well you communicate when you have challenges…

Update: Almost 14 hours after the backup stopped, it has recommenced… Others have reported via twitter that the main website pages was unavailable. Crashplan staff have tweeted back replies such as: “We didn’t seem to have any recent issues”, “We did not report any errors overnight” and “No reported issues overnight”. What is worse, Crashplan not telling the truth or plain not knowing that their website was unavailable? I will probably still subscribe to their service once my 1 month trial period expires. I will not be paying Rolls-Royce prices so I don’t expect Rolls-Royce service.

Tags: backup, Crashplan

Home server hardware

I’ve had a home server running 24/7 for more than 10 years now. Originally my home servers used old hardware I no longer had any use for, at one stage my server setup consisted of three different computers all to some extent reliant on each other. Eventually I had come to rely on my home server so much that this hodgepodge was taking too much of my time to keep running, so I purchased a proper server, a Dell Poweredge 830 with ECC memory and internal space for up to 4 hard disks. I have been very pleased with it, it has run 24/7 for 6 years.
However, no product is perfect, and the Dell Poweredge server ultimately has had two things going against it:

• It wasn’t particularly silent
• Its Intel Pentium 830D CPU is probably one of the most power hungry CPU’s made by Intel.

The noise was not excessive, and I have a cupboard where my node 0 resides. Only problem with that was that it got a little hot during the summers forcing me to leave the door ajar. Power usage was around 115 watts/hour, so just over 1000 kWh/year. At current prices (around £0.13/kWh) it was costing me about £130 to run a year. Being an environmentally-minded person I really wanted to cut down on that.
I’ve been considering various small servers with Intel Atom CPU’s, but they are not exactly cheap compared to Dells latest entry-level servers. Although I would like to cut down on my energy usage I didn’t want to replace a perfectly working system with something that at the end of the day would cost me more than what I would save.

The Dell Poweredge server has now been switched off. After 6 years of continuous use it was probably just a matter of time before one or more of the harddisks would fail, and I finally ran out of disk space as well. With all my photos, CD’s and DVD’s ripped and available to my xbmc mediacenter (and in fact any other computer at home) over my network, 2TB was not enough in the end, so new disks had to be bought. When I then discovered the HP ProLiant N36L Microserver which, with an HP cashback offer, was available for around £125, I was sold.

The Microserver has room for 4 internal harddisks (like the old Dell server), it is considerably smaller, almost silent, uses about ½ the amount of electricity that the Dell used, and the CPU is, according to benchmarks I’ve seen on the internet, faster than the current Intel Atom CPU’s. At the price mentioned above and the reduced power usage, it will earn itself back in less than two years.

Anybody out there interested in a used Dell Poweredge 830?

Tags: Dell, HP, Microserver, N36L, Poweredge, ProLiant, xbmc

The Basic Infrastructure

Connectivity

The centrepiece in my infrastructure is a Linksys WRT54G router/firewall/switch/wifi access-point. Definitely recommended! It has been extremely reliable. For some years now, I’ve been using the DD-WRT third-party firmware with it. Be aware that if bought as new I would recommend buying the WRT54GL. The current “normal” WRT54G does not use Linux but › Continue reading