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I’ve just been a couple of days in Sweden on a hike. It was work related and great fun!

There are some pictures from the trip in the usual place and a small treat here.

The trail...

Thermodynamics and girlfriends

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I came across an article recently, it was about Drakes equation an the number of potential girlfriends in London. That lead me to a similarly  paper that states:

   Since it is much more likely to have a girlfriend, we can suppose that in a random system (one without social standards, fear or psychological complexes) nearly everybody would have a girlfriend. Since this is not the case and we don’t want to violate the second law of thermodynamics we can suppose that people without girlfriends do more work in order to go to a state of lower entropy.
 

This is one of the weirdest conclusions I have ever heard and I love it! It also contradicts the Drake-Backus equation in the most humorous way. Thermodynamics rock!

You can read all of it here.

rsync and backup

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The setup is: Clients -> Server -> NAS. ssh from Client to server, cifs from server to NAS.

First bit, make ssh keypairs for the clients, if the backup-process is supposed to be unsupervised, then make keypairs without passwords. Then I needed to fiddle with the backup-share, permissions screwed with rsync, generating a lot of noise in the log. Stuff got backed up though. Heres what my backupscript ended up looking like:

#!/bin/sh
# for copy from CLIENTBACKUPDIR to /mnt/Backup/$BACKUPUSER directory on server
CLIENTBACKUPDIR=XXX
BACKUPUSER=XXX
SERVERHOST=URL
SSHUSER=XXX
cd $HOME || exit 1
rsync –delete –exclude-from=$HOME/.rsync/exclude-backup \
–timeout=999 -azu \
-e “ssh -l $SSHUSER -i .ssh/backup -ax -o ClearAllForwardings=yes” \
$HOME/ $SERVERHOST:/mnt/Backup/$BACKUPUSER
The $HOME/.rsync/exclude-backup file looks something like this:
#Backup-excludefile
– /Media/*
– /Music/*
– /.*
The path is relative to $HOME
The noperm option made a lot of difference in the /etc/fstab on the server. Otherwise rsync threw up a lot of permission-errors. cifs perhaps isn’t ideal, but it gives me more options.
This even works with DeltaCopy on my wifes Win7 netbook. And it was a nobrainer from all of my Debian-machines and my moms Ubuntu netbook.