I’m still around. Busy with life and work and it’s left me in not much of a mood to code. I did, however, push a new release of Reve. Check it out!
December 23, 2008
October 7, 2008
Another Amanda Post
In the past I mentioned some Pros and Cons of Jungledisk and Amanda and the one listed “con” for Amanda is that it periodically had issues with my buckets and the size of data stored therein.
It turns out that there was a bug with the Amanda S3 device: it had issues with buckets that had a lot of keys (files) in it. Due to the way Amanda works it makes one gig pieces of data on the holding disk and then the S3 device chunks them up smaller and puts them on the S3 device. When the tape/bucket was due to be resused the files in it had to be removed. Fetching the key list (file list) that could be rm’d had a buffer overflow.
I found this out with the awesome help of djmitche (and Freenode #amanda) who wrote a patch for me. I’m pretty sure the patch made its way into amanda trunk. In Gentoo the patch is in app-backup/amanda-2.6.0_p2-r1.
Since applying the patch I’ve had no problems with Amanda at all and it’s run perfectly for me.
September 2, 2008
Following up JungleDisk vs Amanda
Following up to Backing up to Amazon S3 using Amanda (June 28, 2008):
I’ve been having issues with both Amanda+S3 as well as JungleDisk. I’ll outline these here.
JungleDisk Problems
- JungleDisk sometimes destroys all of my data on S3 in the bucket JungleDisk uses and then on the next backup re-uploads all of the data! This is clearly a problem. Luckily I do not have more than a gigabyte of data thats backed up with JungleDisk. If I did this bug (or feature?) would be very expensive.
- JungleDisk doesn’t smartly handle moves. I’d like to be able to move things around on my local filesystem and have JungleDisk notice this and move them. Moving them over WebDAV isn’t feasible.
- JungleDisk scans individual files and doesn’t combine a whole bunch of them into one tarball. This gets very expensive! I wish they’d tar it all up first like Amanda.
Amanda+S3 Problems
- Sometimes the Amanda S3 device module has problems talking to S3. The only fix I’ve found so far is to destroy the bucket, remove it from the tapelist, readd the bucket, reidentify the bucket to Amanda and run amflush. This is clearly not good as it’s just as bad as Jungledisk destroying everything. I haven’t figured out why this happens yet.
Both products are still good and I’ll continue to use them. I’m considering using Amanda on my laptop, however, but this could cause problems in cases where it isn’t connected to the network at backup time.
August 28, 2008
Playing with Git
I’ve begun playing with git over at github by importing Reve’s source.
Eventually I will do away with subversion and trac and move to github for Reve completely. Trac is not very good and often locks up.
As I’m still new with git and github I’ll have to keep contributions to a minimum since I don’t know exactly what I’m doing.
August 14, 2008
Reve is going to MIT (license)
There’s a new revision of Reve that has just been uploaded to Rubyforge: Revision 99.
This includes a major change - Reve is now licensed under a proper license: the MIT License. The terms of the license are now distributed with the package and are.
There is also a fix for the character_id that came back from a market order request.
Why a new license now? Simply because I think it’s important to realise that it’s unlikely that anyone will use Reve to create some billion dollar enterprise that I could have got in on. Yeah, not everyone can be Delicious, Flickr or Facebook. ha ha.
So go forth, ye multitudes and fix, hax, and use. Ruby and Rails both use the MIT license so now Reve should be at home.
July 30, 2008
Eve Online Empyrean Age 1.0 Database Dump for PostgreSQL
Today CCP announced the release of their MS SQL dump. Following in step with past conversions here is a Postgres version. Tested with 8.0.15 but should work on everything.
This dump is odd: CCP is using integers where they mean to use booleans. So in those cases remember 1 is true, 0 is false. Good luck.
Edit: As a note the Eve Online Database Viewer is updated with this dump.
Edit 2 (July 31, 2008): I nearly forgot to give props to bunjiboys for providing the .sql files from which the above dump is derrived.
Fixtures in Rails Suck - this makes them suck less
If you've got a boat load of legacy fixtures laying around (and who doesn't?) it can be a pain now that Rails handles the ID of objects so you don't have to.
On the train back from holiday I wrote a snippet of code to migrate them:
RUBY:
-
def Util.real_yml(klass,col = 'name')
-
y = YAML.load_file(File.join(RAILS_ROOT,'test','fixtures',"#{klass.to_s.tableize}.yml"))
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real_names = y.inject([]) { |names,(key,val)| names <<y[key][col] if y[key][col] ;names }
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real_objs = klass.find :all, :conditions => [ "#{col} IN (?)",real_names ], :order => "#{col} asc"
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yml = ""
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real_objs.each do |real_obj|
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yml += "#{real_obj.name.downcase.gsub(' ','_').gsub('-','')}:\n"
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real_obj.attributes.each do |k,v|
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if k =~ /_id$/ && real_obj.respond_to?(k.gsub(/_id$/,'').to_sym) && ! v.nil?
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n_klass = k.gsub(/_id$/,'').camelize.constantize.find(v) rescue nil
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key = k.gsub(/_id$/,'')
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val = n_klass.name.downcase.gsub(' ','_').gsub('-','')
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yml += " #{key}: #{val}\n"
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else
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yml += " #{k}: #{v}\n" unless k.to_s == 'id'
-
end
-
end
-
end
-
yml
-
end
The use is:
RUBY:
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require 'util'
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print Util.real_yml(Corporation)
Copy/paste into corporations.yml
So far it's working great!
July 29, 2008
The decline of Rails-Core mail list
Lately the rails-core mail list has declined in quality. Spammers have moved in and operate unfettered. Reporting offenders to Google does nothing.
In fact, in order to isolate my personal mail from spam and to keep dspam from getting very confused I've moved the rails-core list to a google mail account. It's a shame but I'm more interested in keeping my other mail free from spam and the dspam quarantine free from ham. Isolation of rails-core until Google can get the spammers off their lists will accomplish the goal.
July 12, 2008
Reve Supports Eve’s Factional Warfare API
Here's a quick announcement to let people know that Reve (0.0.96) now supports Factional Warfare.
The cool new things are:
- Faction-wide war stats
- System Occupancy Data
- List of the top characters and corporations and factions.
- Personal and Corporate war stats
I know the documentation may not be the best, but I'll do my best to improve it for the next release.
Grab the new gem (0.0.96) and give it a whirl!
June 28, 2008
Backing up to Amazon S3 using Amanda
Recently a friend of mine (Sarah) purchased a dedicated server at a hosting company and moved her data to it. Obviously she was in need of a backup solution. She chose Amanda 2.6.0 and to use S3 as her "tape" choice.
Seeing how well it worked for her I asked her to show me how it worked and now my server is also using Amanda to backup to S3. Recovery works with amrecover.
I have quite a bit of data to back up (4.5GB in /home, for example) and with a home DSL connection it takes a long time. However with a bigger pipe using S3 and Amanda would be extremely viable.
I'm very happy with the solution and will likely use it across all of my servers from now on.
For my laptop I'm still using JungleDisk, which seems to work fine. 2.0 is a very good improvement.
