1. Plug a USB drive into the back of her PC, and script an xcopy command (or something similar) so that every hour or so, it copies her important files to the drive. This would be cheap (she doesn’t have that much data), and pretty easy. The solution would protect against drive failure, but not against robbery, fire, or flood.
2. Use winscp to securely copy her files over her internet connection to my NSLU2 network storage. This is more complicated, costs nothing but a bit of time to figure it out, and protects against all possible forms of data loss (unless our whole city is consumed with a fire or flood).

Since I’m already sharing my NSLU2 with Skippy, and I’ve got way more space than she’ll ever need, and I like a bit of a challenge, I’ll go with winscp.
Some pre-requisites that I’ve already got set up:

• NSLU2 running Unslung.
• Use OpenSSH for remote access.
• Forward a port on my router to the OpenSSH port on my NSLU2.
• Establish an account with a Dynamic DNS host, such as DynDNS.com, and set up my router to check in with DynDNS to update my IP address periodically.

Now, on to using winscp for this application.

1. Download the “portable” version of winscp and  save it to a new directory. I renamed it from winscp416.exe to just winscp.exe.
2. Create a new user on my NSLU2 for my mom, and give the account ssh access.
3. Establish the first winscp session to my NSLU2 to save the security keys: winscp sftp://user:password@host:port
4. Save that session in winscp by choosing Save Session… from the Session menu. The default name was user@host, and I chose to keep the password.
5. Create a list of winscp commands, and store them in winscp-commands.txt. The following commands will copy everything from the current directory structure to the home directory on the NSLU2.
   

   option batch on
   option confirm off
   option transfer binary
   synchronize remote -delete
   close
   exit

6. Create a batch file, named backup-files.cmd with the following command
   winscp user@host /console /script=winscp-commands.txt
7. Set backup-files.cmd to run as a scheduled task.

The “synchronize remote -delete” command will put all files from the local directory into the remote directory, deleting any files on the remote that have been removed from the local.

It is also possible to add multiple synchronize commands to this file, but be careful, because the remote directory must exist for the sync to work. For example:

synchronize remote -delete “c:\documents and settings\me” /user/my_stuff

will only work if the directory /user/my_stuff already exists.

http://theplug.net/28/strangerphotos.htm

It would be a fun project at Chautauqua, especially if the sign had a URL where people could go see their and others’ photos. Chautauqua is such a trusting place, I could almost do it with a digital camera.

1. Sign up for Twitter, if you haven’t already. If you don’t have an e-mail you want to share with them, use a dodgeit.com account.
2. Add a link to your blog (or a particular post) in a tweet.
3. Go to step 1, using a different username and dodgeit.com account.

Do this 5-10 times to get your link onto the front page of http://www.s2n.com/pulse/twitter.com. See how many hits you get.

I learned about Google Apps from Skippy a couple of months ago, and decided to give it a try.

Its an interesting concept that lets me manage various aspects of my domain through Google. Their instructions are complete and easy to follow for anyone who has heard of DNS. You don’t have to know the difference between a CNAME and an MX record. So I set up my Google account to manage e-mail and a “start” page. I expected they would be just like Gmail and iGoogle, respectively.

Unfortunately, the Google Apps versions of e-mail and iGoogle appear to be older versions. For example:

• The UI for GA e-mail is about 2 years old, compared with the current GMail version
• The GA e-mail client still has a bug that prevents users from editing imported contacts.
• The GA start page doesn’t allow multiple tabs, whereas the current iGoogle does.
• The GA start page doesn’t allow users (or admins) to customize the number of columns, but iGoogle does.

The other problem I currently have with my Google Apps is that it doesn’t have a version of Google Reader. So, to continue using Google reader, I have to maintain the Gmail account.

Oh well. So far, the Google Apps have been fun to experiment with, and functional enough. If Google Calendar had an off-line client, I might be able to convince my wife to use it.

What I’m seeing in my site stats is a handful of sites that claim to link to me, but are really porn sites that seem to be hoping I’ll click through. Have porm spammers figured out that bloggers tend to be a self-satisfied lot that want to know just how popular we are? Well then, what better way to fool us than let us believe we’ve been linked by some new web page.

Incidentally, I’m not going to mention the URLs in full because I don’t want them to see their site mentioned anywhere. If you are interested, the base of the URL looks like this, without the @ signs.

http://i@s@m@y@m@o@v@i@e@s@.@c@o@m

There was more to the URL at the end, but I assumed that the last bits were just for tracking who gets clicks through, kind of like embedding a special code in a graphic so that they know you viewed their spam e-mail. If someone clicks through, their site will suddenly be on the list of “suckers” who will click through anything.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much I can do about it. I do look at my incoming links, but now I’ll have to be more skeptical if the name doesn’t seem to make much sense or have any relevance to my site.

Update: it turns out that every fake referrer that I’ve received has come from the same IP address: 87.118.120.23. I think my next PHP script will be a WordPress plugin to always give that IP address a 50 MB file of garbage….

My web host allows me to enable AWStats on my sub-domains. I have it enabled on journal.nearbennett.com, and I check all the stats periodically. For example, it was really fascinating to see a bunch of hits come from Stumble Upon for my hard drive clock post. AWStats has a lot of good information that I’m not sure I want to share with the whole world, so I have the whole directory structure protected. But I want people to be able to see what search terms are leading people to my site. So I created a very small PHP script to by-pass the protection, and allow someone to view My Influence on the World.

Here is that PHP code for you to enjoy.
#!/usr/local/bin/php4.cli
< ?php
include_once("../../awstats/journal/awstats.journal.nearbennett.com.keyphrases.html");

?>

Yeah, I know its not much to be proud of, but hey, it works. And its like the third thing I’ve ever done with PHP (the first was of course ‘hello world‘).

I’m pleased to report that if you search Google for hard drive clock, my post is the third on the list behind Make. Yes, I did that a while ago, but please allow me to bask in my glory a little while longer.

Oh, and now people are selling hard drive clocks on eBay. I particularly like this quote:

There are very few of these in existence, probably less than 20.

Yeah, right. I’ve made three my self. And considering this place sold out, I’m pretty sure there are more than 20 of these things out there.

I love it. Unfortunately all my drives are ripped apart now, and I never had quite that quantity. Hm, maybe there is something else I could dream up…

• One of my computers was downloading some large files to the NSLU2’s drives taking up my full DSL bandwidth.
• Simultaneously, on another computer I was watching a video that had been previously stored on the NSLU2. It was a 42 minute video, at roughly 350MB. There were no hiccups or interruptions.

What is the total bandwidth of these two activities? Who cares!?! The point is that it did what I needed it to do.

OK, I have an NSLU2 with two 80GB drives attached, working swimmingly on my network. I have gone through the not-too-difficult process of making it “Unslung” so that I can thoroughly modify it to my hearts content.

After the Unslung, the backup from drive 1 to drive 2 didn’t work. The error message was incredibly vague:

11/13 02:09:04 Drive Backup: Backup fail.
11/13 02:00:00 Drive Backup: Backup start.

It looked like it was working–files were being copied from one drive to the other. A little Googling turned up this message: http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/FixTheDriveBackupForUnslungFirmware

I followed the instructions, and got it working fine.

All this attention to the backup solution reminded me that my method for taking files offsite was less than ideal–for my family photos, I burned a DVD every (ahem, cough) 6 months or so, and took them to work.

So again, I searched around for NSLU2 Offsite solutions. I found a guy who had made it work with Amazon’s S3 service. I estimated how much it would cost to store my 5GB of photos on S3, and it looks like it would be less than $15 per year. Not too shabby at all. Perhaps I’ll go that route if this one doesn’t work.

I then came across a service from MediaMax.com. Free storage up to 25GB, with restrictions only on download, not upload. Also, they have an FTP service to make scripting from Linux possible.

So, I grabbed an account, and started playing with it. One of the limitations of the FTP service is that it is one-way on MediaMax. After you transfer a file to the FTP service, it gets moved to the real storage portal. So, I have to be able to remember locally which files have already been sent. I accomplished this by removing the User execute bit from the file I just transferred. This translates through Samba as the Archive bit in Windows. So it is easy to see from my Windows system whether a file has been sent offsite or not. So I wrote a BASH script to do the job. It’s quick. It’s dirty. It has been 6 years since I wrote shell scripts at work, so my techniques are probably a little rusty. So, if you want to use my script, here is what you need to do.

1. (I assume you have an NSLU2 with one or more drives attached. I also assume you know how to telnet and edit files in vi or some other editor).
2. Unslung
3. Install bash: ipkg install bash
4. Get an account with MediaMax.com (I am not a shill, they just happened to be the first I found with the features I wanted. Its free anyway)
5. Copy my script to your system in the location of your choice.
6. Modify the variables at the top. Note that MediaMax’s FTP service has the password set the same as the username. So if your user name is “MotherGrove”, in FTP only, your password will also be “MotherGrove”. I used two separate variables just in case that changes some day.
7. Add an entry to /etc/crontab to run the script periodically.

#!/bin/bash
IFS=”
UPLOAD=/full/path/of/the/files/you/want/to/store/offsite
WORK=/full/path/where/you/want/the/log/file
SERVER=ftp.mediamax.com
USER=YOURUSERNAME
PASS=YOURUSERNAME
function call_ftp {
eval FULL=$*
echo $FULL
DIR=`dirname “$FULL”`
FILE=`basename “$FULL”`
cd “$DIR”
echo `date` $FULL Starting FTP >> $WORK/offsite.log
ftp -in < open $SERVER
user $USER $PASS
bin
put "$FILE"
quit
EOF

echo `date` $FULL FTP Exit Status:$? >> $WORK/offsite.log
chmod ug-x “$FULL”
echo `date` $FULL CHMOd Exit Status:$? >> $WORK/offsite.log
}
if (($#==1)); then
call_ftp $*
exit 0
fi

find $UPLOAD -type f -perm -u=x -maxdepth 2 -exec $0 ‘”{}”‘ \;

Limitations (or future features)

• This script does NOT mimic your directory structure on MediaMax. All the files will be dumped in your “Uploaded Files” folder. If I ever need to download these, I’ll recreate the folder structure.
• FTP is very poor at reporting errors. I don’t know with certainty that the files are actually transferring. I just spot check my account on MediaMax to be sure I see them.
• Depending on your upload speed, it might take a few days to do the first upload. This script is not smart enough to check and see if it is already running, so you might want your initial CRON entry to be once a week.
• There is not a graceful way to stop it from running. I’ll probably add that in later.
• There is no upload throttling. If this matters to you, hopefully you have a router with QOS, (or one that can be hacked to provided QOS).
• Files are stored unencrypted in your account on MediaMax. I do not know how robust their security policies. If you send sensitive information, please encrypt it before you send it offsite.

Enjoy!