Databases, Systems & Networks

For quite some time I use my Ubuntu machine as a file and backup server for all Macs in my network which is perfectly accessible from the Finder in Mac OS X. There are some instructions available in the web for this task but all failed in my case so I wrote my own tutorial with all the steps needed for it to work properly.

So here’s my little Tutorial for connecting Mac OS X Leopard with Ubuntu and using your Ubuntu machine as a backup volume for Time Machine but all steps can be reproduced on every Linux box and they work with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger too. At the end of this tutorial you will have a server which shows up in the Finder sidebar and behaves just like a Mac server when accessing it from your Macs. To be perfectly integrated with Mac OS X we’re going to use Apple’s Filing Protocol (AFP) for network and file sharing.

Although this Tutorial involves using the Terminal in Ubuntu and looks a bit geeky it’s very easy even for beginners. I have tried to explain all steps and Terminal commands so you may learn a bit about the Terminal too. At the end of the article you can download my Server Displays icon pack quickly made by me with custom icons for a Mac, Ubuntu and Windows server.

Personally I use a fresh installation of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Desktop version (32bit on one machine, 64bit on the other) and Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.3 and later) to connect to them. On my Ubuntu boxes there’s no other file sharing protocol like samba (Windows sharing) or NFS activated.

Rumors are Apple will add some undocumented AFP commands with the Mac OS X 10.5.6 update which therefor won’t be supported by the current Netatalk package (and maybe never will). So be sure to check the latest comments on this article when the 10.5.6 update is out to see if this rumor is true and if there are problems caused by that.

Here are the steps involved in setting up your Ubuntu box as a Mac file server:

1. Modify and install Netatalk (Open Source AFP implementation)
2. Configure Netatalk
3. Configure shared volumes (and Time Machine volume)
4. Install Avahi (Open Source Bonjour implementation)
5. Configure Avahi and advertise services
6. Configure TimeMachine
7. Conclusion, Problems and more informations
8. Downloading and using the Server Display Icons
9. Translations Of This Article

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Source: freedif.org

Rsync is a great tool to replicate, sync some data on your computer. And I’m heavily relying on it to backup my server and to mirror some opensource projects and GNU/Linux Distributions.

But I’ve recently found a Web interface to manage all my rsync tasks called websync.

Websync is a web based rsync task manager where you can add, edit, clone, remove, scheduled,…. your rsync tasks while being able to have a remote host as source or destination of the task (With SSH RSA key too)

Under the free license MIT, Websync has been developped by Sander Struijk and is still actively being maintained, as you can see on github forum. But it is still an early project, so if you face any issue, make sure to report them on the issue tracker.

Interested to give it a shot, here is how to install Websync!

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Source: TheGeekStuff

rsync stands for Remote SYNC.

rsync is used to perform the backup operation in UNIX / Linux.

rsync utility is used to synchronize the files and directories from one location to another in an effective way. Backup location could be on local server or on remote server.

Important features of rsync

• Speed: First time, rsync replicates the whole content between the source and destination directories. Next time, rsync transfers only the changed blocks or bytes to the destination location, which makes the transfer really fast.
• Security: rsync allows encryption of data using ssh protocol during transfer.
• Less Bandwidth: rsync uses compression and decompression of data block by block at the sending and receiving end respectively. So the bandwidth used by rsync will be always less compared to other file transfer protocols.
• Privileges: No special privileges are required to install and execute rsync

Syntax

$ rsync options source destination

Source and destination could be either local or remote. In case of remote, specify the login name, remote server name and location.
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Sauvegarde MySQL

Pour sauvegarder une base de données (sans et avec compression) :

# mysqldump NOM_BASE > NOM_FICHIER
# mysqldump NOM_BASE | gzip > NOM_FICHIER

Pour restaurer une base de données (sans et avec compression) :

# mysqladmin create NOM_BASE
# mysql NOM_BASE < NOM_FICHIER
# gunzip < NOM_FICHIER | mysql NOM_BASE

Sauvegarder toutes les bases :

# mysqldump --opt --all-databases > NOM_FICHIER

Pour sauvegarder uniquement certaines tables :

# mysqldump NOM_BASE NOM_TABLE0 [NOM_TABLE1...] > NOM_FICHIER

Pour presque faire un « –exclude » (qui manque cruellement à mysqldump):

mysql -B -N -e 'show databases' | 
  perl -ne 'print unless /b(?:phpmyadmin|mysql|information_schema)b/' | 
  xargs echo mysqldump -B

Et pour sauvegarder des tables correspondant à un motif (préfixe le plus souvent) :

# mysqldump NOM_BASE $(mysql NOM_BASE -B --column-names=False -e "show tables like 'exemple_%'") > NOM_FICHIER

Pour dumper avec une condition particulière :

mysqldump -t <base> <table> --where="my_id='66666666'"

Ce qui permet de réinjecter des données résultantes d’un SELECT * FROM base.table WHERE my_id='66666666'.

Il est évidement possible de faire toutes ces opération sur une instance en précisant son port avec l’option –port (valable pour mysqldump et mysql).

Pour obtenir une liste des utilisateurs mysql, on peut utiliser cette fonction (glanée sur serverfault) :

mygrants()
{
  mysql -B -N -e "SELECT DISTINCT CONCAT(
    'SHOW GRANTS FOR ''', user, '''@''', host, ''';'
    ) AS query FROM mysql.user" | 
  mysql | 
  sed 's/(GRANT .*)/1;/;s/^(Grants for .*)/## 1 ##/;/##/{x;p;x;}'
}

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1. Introduction

rsnapshot is a backup tool written in Perl that utilizes rsync as its back-end. rsnapshot allows users to create customized incremental backup solutions. This article will discuss the following: the benefits of an incremental backup solution, rsnapshot’s installation, its configuration, and usage examples.

2. Back-it up!

I was recently discussing with a colleague the benefits of backing up your data. My colleague was telling me how one of her customers had recently lost a rather lengthy article that they had been working on. I decided that this may be a good chance to experiment with my netbook and rsnapshot. For this tutorial, I’ll assume you have have 2 pieces of hardware: your host computer, and your destination equipment. I’ll be using an external hard drive for the majority of this post. However, I will briefly cover usage for backing up files over a LAN.

Backing up your data should not be the question to ask but rather how should I backup my stuff? What’s the best way? Well there are many different backup pathways you can take, including block level (dd, partimage), partition level (RAID and all its variations), file level (rsyncand its children applications). I’ll discuss two types of backups in the context of file-based backups.

Normal backups, or full backups, are self explanatory. Normal backups are one way of backing up ALL your files every time you perform a backup. One issue with utilizing a multiple normal backup scheme is that a normal backup takes up a considerable amount of space. For example, if you perform a full backup of a 250gig hard drive at 20% capacity, everyday for just one week (assuming that the amount of data does not fluctuate) will mean that you already have used 350gigs for only one week’s worth of backups. As you can see, that is not feasible in the long run. The other method that I prefer is the incremental backup method. An incremental backup consists of one full backup and then performing additional backups. These additional backups will only backup files that  have changed since the last backup. Instead of backing up your entire hard drive, only the specific files that have changed since the last backup are backed up. As you can probably imagine this is a much more efficient process. One tool that does this on *nix is rsnapshot.

3. What is rsnapshot?

rsnapshot, as mentioned earlier, is an incremental backup utility. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a seven day rotation backup scheme using rsnapshot. Essentially, rsnapshot will create 1 full backup and then subsequent backups will backup only files that have changed. The true power of rsnapshot is its ability to utilize hard-links between each backup. Each backup will appear to be a full backup. In reality each new backup consists of newly created or updated files. rsnapshot can be used over a LAN and can also be ran from cron. In this tutorial, I’ll show both usage examples.

4. Installation

Installation of rsnapshot is pretty straightforward, simply run the following command:

On Debian (or Ubuntu):

apt-get install rsnapshot

On Fedora:

yum install rsnapshot

On ArchLinux:

pacman -S rsnapshot

Now let’s configure rsnapshot.

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