Archive for February, 2005

Clones across the network

With a little bit of work you can have rsync cloning a primary server to a backup server. If the primary server ever fails, all you have to do is reboot the backup from the cloned system and away you go.

Overview of OS X backup options.

The most frequent question that I am asked is how someone can protect all of the data that they store on their Xserves and Xserve RAIDs. It’s a good question, too!

Most of us may have other platforms on our networks as well, so how are all of these servers and clients going to play together?

Since I was faced with this question myself, I decided to write an extensive article, detailing some of the cross-platform solutions out on the market today, primarily IBM’s TSM, Atempo’s Time Navigator and Tolis Group’s new BRU release.

The document is housed in the Projects section on my site, www.district13computing.com, and on MacEnterprise.org. I hope this helps shed some light on a very important decision that we all must face with Mac OS X Server deployments.

The MacEnterprise.org group will be presenting a Webcast on Mac OS X Backup Solutions on Tuesday, February 15 at 1:00 pm EDT.

In this webcast, Thomas Weyer, a Senior Consulting Engineer at Apple, will show you how to look at your storage requirements and build a complete storage solution including tiered storage integrated into a SAN using Xsan. The session will also take you through how to size your backup solution.

For more information on how to watch this WebCast, please visit the MacEnterprise.org website:

http://macenterprise.org/

The broadcast ID needed to view the webcast is ‘macenterprise‘.

Today, Apple released version 10.3.8 of its famed Panther platform, for both the Server and Client versions.

Keep your monitors happy and ghost free

We have a number of machines here with colour calibrated monitors, and to keep this colour as constant as we can it means that power to the monitor can never be turned off. While modern monitors are certainly better than they used to be in dealing with burn-in, we noticed this was becomming an issue for us, so, here’s a tip on how to run the screensaver over the login window.