How to keep your personal data safe

Posted on February 18, 2009 by erik

Everybody worries about it. I’ve got over 30 GB worth of photo’s archived at home, and I wouldn’t want to lose a single one of them. The rule I try to follow is very simple. Some folks call it the LOCKSS principle, which stands for Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. Unfortunately, it’s a little easier said than done, and many folks I know don’t even say it, let alone do it!

Maybe he lost his data...

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Before we get into the details, let’s cover a few ground rules.

  1. You have data you care about on your personal computer. If you don’t care about it, don’t back it up, problem solved.
  2. Since your data is worth something, you’re willing to pay something to keep it. This is important, because the old saying is true, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
  3. You know where your data is. Unfortunately, sometimes this is easier said than done, but if we start with simple stuff like photos and build out from there you can probably figure it out pretty easily.

Ok so now that’s out of the way, how are we going to solve this problem?

It’s pretty simple, really.

  1. Create a data store. Ideally you would do this on a second hard drive. Internal or external, it’s your choice, but usb external ones are cheap and easy so my first recommendation would be that. See the amazon links for a couple options. If you’ve got a monster system drive or are just feeling cheap, at least do yourself the favor of making a C:\Data folder or something like it so you conclusively where the important stuff is.
  2. Consolidate your data. I know it’s counterintuitive, but if you don’t actively choose what to back up and what not to, your backups will quickly get out of control as you accumulate all the flotsam and jetsam flying around on the interwebs onto your hard drive. This step is as simple as making a few folders in data store, such as Documents, Pictures, and Music, and filling them up with the stuff you care about. If you have several computers, I’d suggest moving all the important data to a central computer and enabling file sharing between them in order to keep things simple.
  3. Make some copies!

Making the copies is the fun part.

The simplest solution is to simply use another external USB drive and use old fashioned “copy” to drag the contents of your nice simple data folder to it. As you get more data, you may want something more advanced. There are lots of great free tools to handle keeping multiple copies of directory in sync with other, such as synctoy,  rsync, and unison. You could also any of thousands of different pieces of backup software. I’d save that for later, however, as right now the goal is simplicity, and it’s just about impossible to beat lots of raw copies.

Now that you’ve got at least two copies in your house, you need something off-site. Again, there’s lots of options for this, but unfortunately most aren’t free. Personally, I’ve been using Mozy with good results, but I’ve also heard good things about Carbonite, and frankly, if you’re up for it you could also use rsync or unison with a remote host or a friends computer. The key here is to get a verifiable copy up and out of your physical location and updated regularly, and the internet is the easiest way to do that by far. Typically, these services will run about $5 per month for unlimited personal data, so piece of mind comes pretty cheap.

Finally, the most important part. Restoring. No backup is worth anything if you can’t restore from it. The good news is, since you’re just keeping spare copies on a USB drive, testing restore is easy: Take the drive to a friends computer, plug it in, and browse your files! Open a few up and make sure the they work. Then don’t forget to bring your drive back home!

The online backup service might be a little trickier to verify restores from, but with Mozy you simply go to their web control panel and browse your backup files. A few clicks will download them to your PC where you can verify whether or not the backup worked.

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How to build a business infrastructure in an hour using cloud services

Posted on February 13, 2009 by erik

Lately, the IT world has been abuzz with talk of “cloud computing”, “cloud services”, “cloud storage”, and pretty much everything else having to do with clouds. In an earlier post I talked about some of the risks of using these cloud services. This time, we’ll look at what you stand to gain from them.

Even two years ago, in order to start a business you’d need to think seriously about getting some basic infrastructure in place just so you can look the part. Those days are all but gone now. Let’s take a look at the sorts of IT services you might need to support a new business.

The Office You Don't NeedInternet Domain

Having your own domain isn’t strictly necessary, but really, why not? There are literally dozens of registrars out there who will sell you a domain name. Heck, my company can sell you one if you really want. Register.com is fairly reputable and has been in business for a long time, although I don’t use them personally.

Email

Now that you’ve got a domain name, you need an email service that will support it. For this exercise, I’m going to suggest Google Apps. It’s free in it’s most basic incarnation and gets you a bunch of value added services beyond email. Bear in mind that there are lots of other ways to tackle email, including many low cost and even free options from other companies.

Fax

Personally, I hate faxes but they are nonetheless a fact of life. In fact, legal documents cannot be emailed, so you may find yourself doing business with companies that require you to be able to send and receive faxes. Luckily, this is a really easy problem to solve. There are two good options here, efax and faxaway. Efax is much more polished, and much more expensive. Faxaway is less polished but darn near free at $2/month for your unlimited faxes to your incoming number including voicemail service. You also will pay a few pennies per outbound fax.

Telephone

The explosion of VoIP telephony means there are dozens of options for telecommunication now. Since you probably signed up for faxaway, if you like you can use their voicemail service for inbound calls. For outbound, there are lots of options, but the 800lb gorilla of them all is Skype. They’ve been around for a long time and allow you to download and use their client for free. Since we’re talking about setting up a business here, you will likely want to sign up for a monthly subscription to skype and purchase an inbound telephone number. These services are nonetheless very cheap, around $10 per month. Beyond the quick setup and low cost, pc-based VoIP has the advantage of portability. Set up your laptop in Panera, the local business incubator, or a friends garage, and you’re up and running.

Document Management

It’s not a matter of if, but simply when, in the course of a business that you will need to draft some documents. The great news is that since you already signed up for Google Apps for email, you get Google Docs included with it. Google Docs provides word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation functions which are (in theory) Microsoft Word compatible. They’re certainly not as robust as some of their competitors, but they sure do work.

Your New Virtual OfficeWhile you’re at it, however, you could also check out Zoho Office or download OpenOffice to your local PC.

Invoicing

Chances are that if you’re doing work, you’re going to need to ask people to pay you. Luckily, there’s lots of ways to do that. There are several on-line accounting packages worth taking a look at, including Freshbooks and Zoho Invoices.

Customer Relationship Management

CRM is the acronym for your old fashioned customer list. Luckily, again, there’s lots of options out there including Zoho CRM, HighRise, and SalesForce.com. Or, if you prefer to keep things simple, you can just use the Google Contacts application that came with your Google Apps setup.

Web Presence

Now that you’ve got the basics of your business covered, you’ll need to promote yourself. A good place to start is with a solid promotional web-page explaining your business and products. The good news is that Google Apps gives you headstart on this front as well, with the Google Sites feature of Google Apps. Obviously, you can also choose to host your website with a plethora of other hosts or services as well.

Beyond these basic services, there are dozens of other services available on-line. Just make sure to keep in mind what you’re getting for your money (or free). You might find my previous articles on VoIP technology and SAAS cloud services to be helpful with that.

Last, but certainly not least, remember to have fun!

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What's all the noise about VoIP, anyway?

Posted on February 12, 2009 by erik

You may have seen an advertisement on TV for Vonage, or perhaps a telecomm integrator is pitching you a new VoIP PBX. Maybe you’ve got comcast “digital voice” or one of the equivalent business grade systems from incumbent carriers like AT&T, something like IP Flex or Business VoIP. Or perhaps you talk to your oversees friends for free using Skype, MSN or iChat. The fact is, VoIP is everywhere, but it remains confusing.

The good news is that it’s conceptually very simple. First, let’s break down the acronym. Voice over Internet Protocol. Now, that was easy! VoIP just means any technology used to transmit voice communications over the Internet. Unfortunately, from here on out it gets more complicated.

A high quality VoIP compatible handset.

A high quality VoIP compatible handset.

In order to understand VoIP, it’s also important to understand the “old way”, known as the Public Switched Telephone Network, or PSTN for short. This technology is based the same stuff invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, although over time it has morphed, become digitized, and a very advanced system of switches put in place. The key characteristic of the PSTN is that it always allocates a “pair of wires”, digital or analog, between you and the person you are talking

You also need to understand a bit about the Internet. The Internet is a packet-switched network, with providers establishing peering points and routing via the BGP protocol. The interesting thing about being packet switched is that between any two hosts on the Internet there is a multitude of possible routes. Bear in mind that only one route will be in use at a time. The key point here is that you don’t have much control over which route will be used. In addition, all traffic between those two points is broken into individual packets, each of which might take a different path across the Internet.

So, put the two together and the issues become apparent. With analog telephony, you have a guaranteed path, and guaranteed performance. With VoIP, you have a dynamically allocated path based on breaking the transmission into tiny packets. This dynamically allocated path means variability, and quality voice communications require consistency.

There are lots of techniques to try to improve the consistency of Internet packet delivery, such as private networks, high compression codecs, Class of Service tags, Quality of Service, traffic shaping and many others. When implemented correctly CoS tagging and end-to-end QoS rules in conjunction with the wider signal bandwidth of a VoIP telephone can result in better than PSTN voice quality (typically measured using a Mean Opinion Score or MOS). However, since the Internet is not necessarily designed for voice transmission, VoIP signals are often not properly QoS’d and VoIP on the whole has gotten a band rap. This is why you’ll see Comcast offering “Digital Voice” and AT&T offering “BVoIP using CoS” and trying to convince you they aren’t selling that “crappy VoIP stuff”.

Don’t buy the BS, it’s all VoIP, it’s just more likely that they’re doing it right.

So. What’s in it for you? In short, everything and nothing. Practically, it means that voice calls around the world need not cost any more than across the office. In addition, since everything is handled digitally, you can easily route VoIP through a computer and get some benefits from communications convergence. Since VoIP runs over the internet, you can also move your “home phone” from one location to another with no hassles at all. You can even run a VoIP phone over Wifi (or on your iPod), making a cheap approximation of a cell phone without any contracts! Finally, VoIP falls outside the traditional regulatory domain of PSTN communications so you can save a few pennies in regulatory fees and tariff charges as well.

How do you know if it’s right for you? In short, you’ll need to try it out. Be aware that VoIP services that match the quality of PSTN services are likely to be price competitive. As usual, the “you get what you pay for” rule often applies, so beware of anything that seems too good to be true. The key to getting value from VoIP is to determine exactly what your needs are, try out the proposed system in production, and determine exactly how much money you’ll save. From a business standpoint, without a clear ROI case, VoIP is probably not something to get excited about. Luckily, that case is usually easy to make!

Stay tuned for the next article about VoIP at your local office instead of across the internet.

Useful References

  • Added 2009-02-13: This post at VoIPSchool has a great breakdown of some of the types of VoIP services out there.
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Is your data safe in the SAAS cloud?

Posted on February 9, 2009 by erik

While I was browsing around the web, I found Craig Burton’s post about the state of blogging software. He’s right, 100%. If you’re trusting some free web service with the only copies of your blog content, you definitely run the risk of losing it all. See this true story if you need more convincing.

However, it really only gets worse. Lots of paid services make it very difficult to get a useful snapshot of your data out, as well. For instance, while NetSuite provides a “full data export”, it doesn’t include any custom fields or custom tables. Given some of your most important data is likely to be in your customizations, will you be able to get your business back up and running quickly if that’s the data you have? Granted, they do run out of an enterprise-grade data center and make backups, but what if they go out of business?

Google Docs, for instance, can’t be backed up without a bunch of sketchy thirdy party scripts such as this browser hack or this command line application.

All that said, the key here is risk analysis. Most folks don’t back up their home computers, so using a SAAS service that runs out of a datacenter (hopefully!) is probably better than leaving stuff sitting around on a single hard drive at home or the office.

Here’s some of the factors to consider:

  • Does the provider offer an SLA or otherwise warrant their ability to provide your service. What compensation does it offer? Probably not a alot…
  • Does the provider have on-site redundancy? It’s not inappropriate to check if they’re using RAID and what level it is.
  • Does the provider make backups of your data? On what schedule? Are they stored off-site? What’s their recovery time objective for restoring that data in the event of a disaster?
  • Can you make a backup of your data? Is that backup usable? If you can’t test the restore, you probably shouldn’t trust it. In some cases, the sheer size of this makes it impossible, but in most cases it shouldn’t be. A simple URL you can click to download a full copy of the entire system locally is worth a lot. The free password management site Clipperz does a great job of this.
  • Is there an exit strategy to an alternative product? Data is great, but what you really want is to keep using your data, and to do that will require an application.

What other questions should you ask of a prospective SAAS cloud application? What other applications out there are doing a good job, or a bad job of providing an exit strategy?

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What is Network Attached Storage, anyway?

Posted on February 9, 2009 by erik

Network Attached Storage, or NAS. You’ll see a lot of storage industry pros debating about what it really is, and why their flavor of NAS is better than their competitors. The term NAS comes from the fact that originally a NAS allowed “storage devices” which speak SCSI to be attached to a “network”, speaking ethernet.

But really then, what is it? Actually, it’s just a file server, the same thing you get when you right-click on a folder and select “share” on your windows system. However, a good NAS appliance will have some or all of the following:

  • Multi-protocol capability -  CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI are all pretty basic anymore. However, if you need concurrent access to a filesystem from both NFS and CIFS look very closely at how the system mandles permissions and how it will effect you.
  • Snapshot capability – This allows you to store point-in-time snapshots of your shares. Windows XP and Vista have shell integration for this and vista even has this capability built-in.
  • Redundancy – A NAS will typically use some form of RAID to insulate you from data loss due to hard drive failure. Remember that hard drive failure is by no means the only way to lose data, however!

So why should you buy a NAS instead of just re-purposing that old machine gathering dust in the closet? Well, firstly, maybe you shouldn’t. There are several open source NAS appliances out there, and they work very well for many people. They are cheap, they work, and since they’re open source they’re documented and repairable by your local linux wizard.

However, you’ll still likely miss out on a few key differentiators:

  • Performance and Scalability – Enterprise-grade NAS appliances are designed to serve thousands of clients concurrently without a hiccup. This means NetApp, Sun 7000, BlueArc, EMC Celerra and some others. Anything running windows storage server and/or having less than a full tray of disks probably won’t be anything to write home about. But don’t assume an expensive unit will meet all your expectations just because it’s expensive. Demand a real demo of the actual product you’re considering buying running your applications. Unless you’re buying a lot of them, good luck, but you might be able to negotiate a 30-day money back if nothing else by trying.
  • Hardware Integration – Enterprise-grade NAS products will have tightly integrated software and hardware. They will know when a drive has failed and turn on a nice red light on that drives carrier. NetApp, at least, will even phone home and have another drive delivered to your door automatically if the unit is under contract.
  • Reliability – Enterprise-grade NAS products are engineered to meet strict uptime guidelines. They boot fast, they are designed not to crash, and they have had thousands of hours of R&D and testing put into their data protection techniques. They are also designed to support fully redundant operation and their recovery methodology is well known.
  • Support – Real NAS products are sold with support contracts. There is an aftermarket support industry, and a training and certification programs for folks who operate them. This makes it easier to keep them running and find folks to help do it.

In general, like in most things in life, you get what you pay for. The key is knowing if you need what you’ll get. Hopefully this overview has helped you to understand that a bit better. Comments welcome, of course.

Downloadable NAS Appliances:

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New Location

Posted on January 19, 2008 by erik

I’ve moved the this blog from work to my own site in preparation for decommissioning some systems. Hopefully everything will follow, as I’ve got a bunch of permanent redirects in place. If not, http://erik.labianca.org/blog is my new official location.

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Windows Print Spooler Hangups

Posted on December 5, 2007 by erik

I know, it seems obvious… but when you’ve got one of those stupid print jobs stuck in the queue and they won’t go away… using the services manager to restart the print spooler apparently a pretty effective remedy in many cases. More later if I find out anything less lame.

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Oracle VM Manager on CentOS 5 i386 Install Notes

Posted on November 17, 2007 by erik

So everybody knows by now that Oracle just jumped into the virtualization fray with their new Oracle VM product. If you’ve been under a rock, go to the oracle website to check it out. Given that I’m cheap and currently using VMWare’s free offering, I jumped at the chance to check out a supposedly ‘enterprise ready’ Xen implementation for free. The 1/3 the overhead claim is just gravy!

Anyway, as cool as Oracle Enterprise (Unbreakable?!) Linux may be, I’m running CentOS and am perfectly happy with it. Oracle VM wants a dedicated machine for the management station, which I can arrange for with a little tweaking. However, I build most of my machines up from ‘minimal’ installs. I read in the Oracle documentation that I would need libaio installed to make things go, which I did without any trouble.

However, I also needed to install the ‘bc’ package in order for the install script to work. I had to install the oracle XE .rpm by hand in order to figure this out. Note to Oracle. Get with the program and put a dependency on the ‘bc’ package! You’ll also need to install vixie-cron if you built up from minimum, as Oracle VM expects to be able to install a cron.d script.

In addition, it wasn’t entirely obvious from the documentation that’ll need a jdk installed. Well, you will. I’m using jdk-6u2-linux-i586.rpm, you can likely download it from java.sun.com.

Next, while the installer does tell you that the oc4jadmin default password is ‘oracle’, when I was asked for it I kept trying to use the passwords I’d already provided for all the other services. This didn’t work well, so bear in mind you’ll need to supply the ‘oracle’ default password at that state.

So, to recap:


yum install libaio vixie-cron bc
rpm -Uvh jdk-6u2-linux-i586.rpm
sh ./runInstaller.sh


Follow the prompts, remembering to supply 'oracle' as the oc4jadmin password.

Maybe this will save somebody the couple hours of messing around I wasted trying to get this to run! It does appear as if the install has completed, and I’m able to see the console, so look forward to an actual report soon.

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LGA 775 Replacement Mounting Clips

Posted on July 28, 2007 by erik

I’ve been trying to find these blasted mounting clips for the stock intel socket lga775 heatsink/fan units for the better part of the last month.

Intel lga775 replacement mounting pins

If you’ve ever tried to install them, or even worse, remove the heatsink after a not-perfect installation, you’ll know why I need replacements. They break easily! Well, after spending a few hours looking at complete new replacement heatsink units and noting that half of them use these pins in the first place, I renewed my search and finally found a forum post link directly to the intel site where they sell them in packs of 4!

Voila, Kit Fasteners for LGA775 fan heatsinks (set of 4)

Now, if only their store would work … grrrrrr.

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Facebook

Posted on July 18, 2007 by erik

So I’ve been following the Scobleizer every now and again via Google Reader, and he just won’t stop going off about facebook. I signed up a while back, but without a community and not finding anybody on there I knew, I gave it up. However, he’s right. Facebook applications are pretty darn cool, and might even motivate me to finish tweaking my blog and actually publish on a regular basis. The google reader application is cool at least. So, there you have it. Now if I could just find 1/2 as many people I know on facebook as I have found on MySpace I’ll be pleased!

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