A couple of weeks ago I decided I needed to retool some of the NCGDAP data processing tools I wrote when I started at NC State in 2005. For awhile I’d been using subversion, but fell out of the habit. I was pretty confused to find that I had at least 4 versions of everything I’d written and no idea which was latest, which features I’d already incorporated, or (embarrassingly) what everything did. I’d clearly been shirking some system administration duties.

After some time spent with diff and a text editor, I was down to one version of each application. I also spent some time trying to make sure I didn’t have to do it all again. I sometimes work on my Thinkpad at home, at conferences, and on the bus, which eliminates keeping things solely on a network somewhere. Knowing that I sometimes forget which files have been modified, I wrote a bi-directional rsync over ssh process to sync my Thinkpad with my desktop and can run it from an icon on my Gnome panel.

I also wrote a nightly cron job to backup my work desktop to a network drive. The NCGDAP applications reside on the data processing server so I Samba mount that directory at boot. I installed and configured network-manager-vnc finally. It was ridiculously easy compared to vpnc, which never worked correctly. At home, I configured sshfs mounting of my work desktop from my home desktop so I never have to make a local copy of anything to work on it.

Last by not least, I finally got around to installing Cygwin on Brandi’s Windows XP laptop. Now, she can click an icon in her start menu that starts an rsync over ssh backup job to my desktop. She had been copying her My Documents directory and pasting it into her home directory on my machine using Samba, which took eons. I also added it to Windows Task Scheduler, which is utter crap compared to cron. After the first 8 hour run (~80 GB of music), it takes seconds and I don’t have to wonder about compliance.

Here are links to some of the things I wrote:

Cygwin rsync script, backup batch file to run Cygwin script, laptop sync bash script, sshfs mount script, sshfs umount script

For the record, I’m neither a programmer nor a system administrator. I’m just a librarian.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 9:18 am and is filed under Free Software, Play, Technology, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.