Not only can it save enormous amounts of bandwidth:
Presto reduced the updates to 2.9 M from 74 M which is a 97% savings.
What I like about the presto deltarpms plugin for yum is, that it shifts the burden especially for large updates from a potentially scarce resource to a more plentiful one: from the network to the local CPU. Also, I find the bit of reporting that it comes with just exactly right.
Finishing rebuild of rpms, from deltarpms <delta rebuild> | 74 MB 00:56
Nice!
This morning my machine totally stalled: first thing I noticed was that there was a cat process causing heavy IO wait, next thing the hard drive was nearly full. After some digging it turned out that some unsuccessful printing attempts had left 75G worth of messages like below in the message log, which had just been archived. Printer still doesn’t talk to me …
... prnt/hpijs/services.cpp 386: unable to write to output ...
I personally don’t believe, that a printer driver should keep writing the same error message to syslog a gazillion times, even if that is an effective way of making the system go quiet eventually.
Not the hardest thing to do, certainly not as complicated as I had thought it to be and next to perfect for my file server at home. Here is what I had to do:
- get the brackup sources via svn (from http://code.sixapart.com/svn/brackup/trunk/)
- on my Fedora 10 Server, I had to install perl-Net-Amazon-S3 and perl-DBD-SQLite via yum, ymmv
- perl Makefile.pl, make and make install did their usual trick (you’ll end up with an installed program that is)
- after that, just execute brackup in your home directory once: it will come up with a help message and create an example config file there (~/.brackup.conf)
- Add your backup source description and S3 credentials there
- to complete the configuration, you will also need your gpg key available (I had to create one with gpg –gen-key)
Now with a source like, say Documents configured, you can just brackup –from=Documents –to=amazon and it will just encrypt and backup everything in there to your S3 account. Stop making up excuses – start backing up your digital photos!
Here is an example config file:
[TARGET:amazon]
type = Amazon
aws_access_key_id = xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
aws_secret_access_key = xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
keep_backups = 5[SOURCE:Documents]
path = /home/steffen/Documents/
chunk_size = 5m
gpg_recipient = F179E120
you are a Fedora (9) user and try to put a remote HP scanner (in my case, it is inside a LaserJet 3055 All-in-One) to work, do not forget to install the separate scanner driver package libsane-hpaio. All the goodnes of the HP Linux tools and xsane ends in frustration (about the scanning part) if you fail to do so. Otherwise, I would like to state that I am pretty satisified with that particular device and its indifference regarding operating systems.
There is one feature of yum in Fedora 9 I was not aware of: if, during an installation, you feel unsatisfied with the download rate provided by the current mirror, you can just hit Ctrl-C once, and yum will cancel the current download and try the same file from a different mirror.
(6/7): blabla.fc9.x86_64.rpm (30%) 23% [========== ] 11 kB/s | 384 kB 01:47 ETA Current download cancelled, interrupt (ctrl-c) again within two seconds to exit. (6/7): blabla.fc9.x86_64.rpm | 1.6 MB 00:02
Apparently, that fancy piece of javascript in the side column is somewhat broken. Last time I looked, it promised the release date for Fedora 9 to be in 13 days. Today, it says 25. Hopefully. it gives them time to bake in some more fixes.