I was playing racquet ball with Kendall yesterday, and I was running backwards, towards the front wall to try and get behind the ball, and my right ankle rolled underneath me as I was putting my right foot down.

There was a really nasty internal crunching sound, and it hurt like hell, so I thought that maybe I'd broken it. I was able to walk home from the Club, so I figured it wasn't broken, but the swelling was pretty bad.

Several hours later at Urgent Care, they confirmed with an x-ray that it wasn't broken, so it's now strapped up and in an ankle brace. I have to keep off it for 10 days.

I seem to have pretty bad ankles in terms of rolling. I quite often stop myself from stepping down on my foot when the ankle's rolled inwards slightly. Back in May I rolled my left ankle a bit, just crossing the street, and it's still sore.

John Goerzen writes an entertaining piece on his ongoing battle with Dell to stop receiving advertising from them.

(The comments on the post are rather interesting in themselves)

I say "good on you, John" for taking a stand. Now that I know of these prohibitory orders, I might try them out on Pennysaver so I stop getting their stupid catalogs.

A while ago our junk mail situation got completely out of hand, and at the time I found 41pounds.org, which for a very reasonable $41, did a very good job of stopping pretty much all of the addressed spam.

About the only thing we get now is a small wad of catalogs that USPS delivers to every resident, which isn't explicitly address to us by name, just the apartment number. That and these stupid "checks" from Washington Mutual that we can use against our credit card account with them. They give me the screaming heebie jeebies, and I shred them on sight, because I've seen how insecure cheques are.

I, for one, like Lucas' idea.

Eddy Petrișor wrote about doing some sort of user supported thing for snapshot.debian.net, which I was saddened to learn from his post had reached capacity in May.

I think rather than relying on the generosity of random users, the Debian Project should just throw some money at the problem. It's got more than enough. Disk is cheap.

I'd think that with a few fully loaded SR2421's and an Ethernet switch, you'd be laughing.

Somehow (thankfully) I've managed to avoid much to do with backups in my career as a sysadmin. It's always been someone else's responsibility, that's been fine by me.

For some reason, I've been more paranoid lately, and with all of the crazy shit I've been doing to daedalus, I wanted to have a backup, just in case. Maybe it's old age.

So a while ago, I went and had a stab at setting up Amanda, since pretty much whenever I've been near a bunch of sysadmins and someone asks for a recommendation on what to use, "Amanda" is the answer.

I jumped through all of the hoops to have caesar be the backup server, and daedalus be a client. I set up a virtual tape library on caesar. I think I then lost interest for a while, until I was going to upgrade daedalus to Etch, and I wanted to have a successful backup first.

I had the holding disk and the virtual tape library on the same filesystem, and it was nice and big, yet I kept running into this error about insufficient space. "dump larger than available tape space" was the complaint.

I tried making the filesystem larger. I tried adding more virtual tapes. Nothing would placate it. After another round of Googling, I discovered that the problem was because Amanda would only only span a maximum of four tapes, and the filesystem I was trying to backup was way bigger than that. So I told it to use up to 10 tapes in a run (runtapes 10) and then lo and behold, I got a successful backup out of the sucker.

So that was mostly all good, but occasionally a backup would fail, or fail once an succeed on a retry, because tar exited non-zero, with "file changed as we read it". I did some more Googling tonight, and discovered this Amanda/GNU tar compatibility matrix.

It turns out that the version of tar and the version of Amanda shipped in Debian Etch aren't compatible with each other. Suck! Oh wait, they're maintained by the same person! Argh!

So aside from the occasional backup failing due to a file being written to at the time of the backup, it's working fairly well. My DSL link isn't the fastest, so a full backup of daedalus can take over 48 hours to complete, but I'm not paying for inbound bandwidth at home, so it's not a big deal.

I initially thought that to do a restore, I'd have to run amrecover on daedalus, and then I'd have to stream the contents of multiple tapes back to it at the appalling uplink speed of my DSL connection, but fortunately amrecover has a sethost command, so I can restore just the files I need on another machine local to caesar at LAN speeds, and just transfer the files I restore to daedalus. So that's all pretty neat.

I quite like the FTP-client-like interface of amrecover. It's cool how you can use setdate and just go back in time.

I had the opportunity to do a test restore recently when one of my users nuked his Maildir directory by accident. Unfortunately I was unable to recover the needed files in that case, and I'm not entirely sure what the problem was, so there's some more testing to be done before I'll be fully confident that I can rely on it.

There's a lot of configuration options available as well, and I think I got the config I'm currently using from a template or something, so there's probably a fair bit of tweaking I can do.

Oh, and I'm constantly reminded of this quote from a previous life, where technical details bubbled too far up non-technical management:

"Who is Amanda, and what is her role in the backups?"

Spoken by a co-worker, fighting with nano, when all he wanted was less to browse the installer log to diagnose why an installation with d-i failed.

One of the things I've wanted to do since I discovered that Caltrain (and the VTA light rail) are well-equipped to take bikes, was go for an outing further afield on our bikes using one of these methods of public transport.

So we finally got around to doing that yesterday, when we threw our bikes on the train, and BART, and went for a ride around Golden Gate Park.

The grand plan was to bike to the Caltrain station, take Caltrain to Milbrae, BART to downtown, then bike from there to the park, and then catch an afternoon showing of The Dark Knight in IMAX at the Metreon, then bike back to the BART station, and reverse the whole thing.

We had a minor hiccup in that Sarah had just gotten her bike back from a friend she'd lent it to, and as we were about to head to the Caltrain station, discovered that it a broken spoke. She managed to extract the spoke and we got to the station with a couple of minutes to spare.

It turned out that Mike's Bikes were fairly close to the BART station, so we stopped in there on way to the park, and they were able to fix the spoke on the spot in 20 minutes for the princely sum of $21.

Unfortunately the weather was pretty typical summer San Francisco weather, and it was quite cold and foggy. It didn't get any better as we got closer to the park (and the coast), so the ride around the park itself wasn't terribly exciting. The hill we had to get over (Hayes Street) was a bit of a slog. On the way back we saw the filming of a Japanese Nissan commercial (complete with right-hand drive car).

I'd done some research into bike parking beforehand, and found that all of the parking garages are required to provide bicycle parking, and there's a pretty comprehensive list.

So we parked our bikes in the Moscone Center garage, which was about a block from the Metreon, and went and caught the movie.

The Dark Knight was really good. Very... dark. I really liked Ledger's portrayal of the Joker, much better than the original. I wonder if they'll just keep re-imagining the Batman movies over and over? There was pretty good continuity from Batman Begins. I thought the voice of Batman was a bit ridiculous though, at least initially. You kind of got used to it after a while.

Anyway, we got back to the parking garage, and some lowlife had cut through the cable lock that we'd used to lock our bikes to each other and the rack, and stolen Sarah's bike! Annoyed does not begin to describe it.

We trundled off the seven or eight blocks to the Hall of Justice to file a report. The SFPD weren't the least bit interested, really. The somewhat astounding thing was the bike racks were right behind the cashier's office, and there was video surveillance, and someone still managed to just walk right in, cut the cable, and walk out with the bike. We checked with the duty manager, and he reviewed the video footage and said they have footage of him walking in and then walking out with the bike. So hopefully the police will get hold that.

We have to see if we can dredge up the purchase documentation for the bike and see if the serial number is recorded. I have no idea if we'll ever see the bike again. Our renter's insurance may cover it, but I suspect the deductible won't make it worth our while to make a claim.

I have to say (and it's not like it's a recent discovery or anything) that the Bay Area's public transportation is a joke. It cost us $32 to go from Mountain View to Downtown San Francisco, via Caltrain and then BART. Our Prius takes about 11 gallons at worst, and with gas prices being at say $4.30 a gallon, that's about $47 a tank. We get about 400 miles out of a tank usually, and it's vaguely 40 miles from home to the guts of Golden Gate Park. So it's cheaper, and faster to drive to San Francisco than it is to use a bicycle and public transport. Particularly when you factor in the risk of theft of your bicycle.

Our next bike lock will be one of those fancy Kevlar ones.

Well that happened, and uneventfully as well.

Now if only IntaServe actually made it possible to update glue records, everything would be done...

What is it with domain registrars and glue records? Are glue records that much of an edge case these days that no one bothers having an interface for managing them?

I've found a new colo for my server, and Brent has kindly offered to do the remote hands work for me tomorrow. Fingers crossed it'll be fairly smooth...