It has been a while since last time, so lets do this. 'This week on the command line' is my look at what I have read online in the past seven days. If you have read or written anything cool then leave a comment below and tell me about it.

Phill has taken up Ruby on Rails which is kind of scary. Learning Python is quite enough for me right now, however I am just a humanist while but Phill is a proper computer scientist.

Everyone's moving house

Brock Noland's UseBash has become Bash Cures Cancer. I love the new design. Very clear and looks identical in Elinks and Firefox.

/udev/random/source has moved to blackpantheras.livejournal.com, Happy Birthday by the way.

MythTV

MythTV is the Linux based digital TV recording software. I have been wanting to get into MythTV for a while but have not had the time to sit down and read the manuals yet.

Ravi at Linuxhelp has two nice posts about MythTV, MythTV - Record and playback all your favourite TV soaps in GNU/Linux and How MythTV flags commercial advertisements.

Windows Warrior

Vipul Machiwal from India has started a new blog called "T|-|E //@RR!OR".

He has seven posts so far, and they aim at taking control of your Windows system through the command line, hidden and little-known options, registry editing and external programs.

These are the kind of things that I found fascinating to discover in my Windows 98 days, and I'm glad that there is still a lot that Windows users can do to improve their computing experience.

Safely getting on info on your Microsoft IIS Server

I prefer a Linux/Unix server, and whenever I have to do anything with a Microsoft IIS Server I have to cross my fingers and pray that it will not all come crashing down around me, IIS just seems so fragile.

Hisham's blog features a nice script that has been ported to ASP that you can bung on your Windows server and will give you a nice webpage of information about how your server is doing. If I was running an important Windows server then I would be tempted to devote a whole monitor just for this.

apt-get for Windows

On the Mac OS X there is darwin ports, fink, and Gentoo for OS X (see my own comprehensive treatment here). All of these allow you easily install open source software in a fast and automated way.

When Daniel Robbins, the founding lead of Gentoo Linux, worked for Microsoft, I was expecting some new cool package management system for Windows. Sadly not, he was soon snapped up by some other company instead.

A proper package management system for Windows 'is an idea whose time has come', as my New Testament lecturer used to say (with tonque firmly in cheek):

> "win-get is an automated install system and software repository for Microsoft Windows"

If you have ever used Debian or Ubuntu then the idea does not need explaining. I have not tried it yet, at some point, I'll dig out my harddrive with Windows on and let you know.

Someone who has tried it is the blogger Mohammad Hafiz bin Ismail, apparently known as 'papit' to his online chums. You can check out his coverage here.

The Ultimate laptop backup?

I personally have a mac laptop (running Gentoo Linux) and an external firewire drive (the harddrive from my old laptop inside a little caddy) that I use for extra storage. I backup the home directory of my laptop to my home computer over SSH.

If the internal drive dies and I lose the system files then I can reinstall Linux. If the laptop gets lost then I have no immediate need for a Gentoo system that has been optimsed for the macbook! Also the drive tends to go with the macbook so I lose one I lose it all anyway.

However I was interested in reading "transparent backups and the ultimate macbook" by 'peliom'.

He uses an arRAy of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) and a firewire drive to do backups. Basically he has setup up his macbook internal drive and his firewire drive to be an array.

So when he goes out in the daytime he takes his mac and works on it, leaving the firewire drive at home. So in RAID terms, there has effectively been a disk failure (the firewire drive has gone) and his laptop continues using the single drive.

When he comes home he plugs in his firewire drive and goes to sleep, restoring the array, and the computer copies the entire drive onto the firewire drive, block by block.

Ignoring the wear on the external firewire disk, I cannot believe that this is faster than rsync simply coping the changed files. Although he does point out that rsync uses more CPU time as a percentage, surely it would be far far quicker than the two hours that it takes to copy the files, block by block.

However his key argument, which is quite persuasive, is that there is little requirement for human input:

> "...the biggest feature is the transparency. Because it’s so automatic, as easy as plugging in the power cord, I know this is backup that will actually happen as opposed to me just thinking about it."

He uses Mac OS X, and while I own a copy, I do not really use it on a daily basis. However, on GNU/Linux/BSD there are plenty of options for automated backups.

As I said earlier, my system works over the Internet so I do not have to remember to even plug in the drive. However, that is assuming more than one computer.

So back to the one machine and one firewire drive. What first comes into my head now would be to add an extra runlevel, so when the firewire drive is plugged in, the system runs whatever backup commands are required.

Another option would just be a cron job, some cron daemons attempt to 'catch- up' on missed cron-jobs.

Any other ideas? If so then please leave a comment and let me know. What is your ultimate laptop backup?