The FreeBSD console is colorless by default – but most terminals and SSH clients these days support color. The benefits of colorizing your console should be pretty obvious. It makes your life a little easier – you don’t have to…
The Duke URLGrabber package for Python makes it incredibly easy to retrieve files from remote servers, and it abstracts urllib2 for you in a protocol-independent way, so you can focus on your application instead of spending time working with Python’s…
Whether you’re using FreeBSD for your workstation, a simple home server, or in a complex IT environment where reliability is critical, losing the data on your hard disk(s) is probably the worst type of failure you can have. I’ve already…
When Wonderful Remote first starts, you’re asked to enter your registration information (or leave it blank for the 48-hour trial), and then you’ll enter your TiVo’s IP address on your network. You’re then presented with the main screen, which provides…
I previously discussed configuring JungleDisk on FreeBSD. It’s not quite the easiest to install since FreeBSD isn’t officially supported. To take that a step further, I’m now going to show what I do to back up my FreeBSD box at…
I wanted to follow up a previous post with some additional comments. This past week, a popular social bookmarking service called Ma.gnolia went down and lost all of their users’ data. Their users were understandably angry and frustrated. Citizen Garden…
For those of you who don’t know, JungleDisk is a utility that allows you to back up data to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Soon, it will also allow you to use Mosso’s Cloud Files service, which is similar to…
Over the past few years, a major paradigm shift has occurred in how (and where) our data is stored. We’ve had data online for quite a while – ever since the first “guestbook” applications appeared on peoples’ GeoCities home pages…
I am a strong believer that most non-IT people don't take seriously the need to have a reliable method of backup for their important data. Just ask yourself: What happens when you can no longer access the data on your computer? It doesn't matter what happens - you could or lose your laptop or have it stolen, or the hard drive in your computer could fail. Any way you look at it, your data is toast. What, then, would you do to recover it? It's always a good time to think about backups, and to help, I'll show you what I do.