XS Server specs: backup plan??, new user info

[Hal Murray]

Disks will fail.  I sure don't want to be the one who has to tell a school 
full of kids that all their work has been lost.  (Maybe it's good for them?  
:)

Is there a backup plan?  I didn't find anything, but maybe I didn't look in 
the right place.



My straw man on backup is that there are several problem areas to cover:
  environmental (flood or quake trashes system)
  hardware dies (disk fails)
  nasty software bug (trashes file system)
  user error (aka fatfinger such as rm *, or rm valuable.txt)

rsync to a remote system covers the first 3, but that only works if you have 
a good enough network connection.  rsync to a local system covers the second 
two.

Second choice is another local disk on the same server.  raid and such lets 
you keep going if a disk fails, but I don't think that's important for OLPC.  
A nightly backup run lets the second disk be powered off most of the time.

A local copy needs some sort of off site backup plan to cover environmental 
disasters.  That probably requires something like a DVD writer.  (which might 
be a good idea for other reasons)  Or maybe a good network connection, or 
good software to use a marginal link.  With limited resources, I might be 
willing to ignore the off-site backup.  If the school gets trashed by a 
flood/quake, I probably have more serious problems to worry about.



I'm not sure how to protect against occasional user errors.

I'm willing to redo up to a days work.  I'd prefer something better., but 
that's my straw man.  My main worry is that I might forget to redo some minor 
edit.

My current setup at home is a kludge: I take nightly and weekly backups to a 
second disk.  I'd like some way to hold onto changed/deleted files for a week 
or so, maybe with a max of 1 per day to reduce space and clutter.



Actually, this brings up another area.  There are several high level things 
that I think should be explained to people before they start using a 
computer.  Is there a plan for this area?  Is anybody collecting a list?  ...

Here are the ones I can think of:

  backup plan - computers fail, people screwup, shit happens.
    people need to be prepared for the system to trash their work
    and understand how likely it is
    and cover their own ass if it's really important

  scams and spam and viruses
    chain letters, MLM marketing, 419s
      (if it's too good to be true...)
    viruses, including "tell everybody" ones that infect people

  passwords
    basically, don't ever give yours out.  Ever!
      (need to cover "good" guys who do things for you, and maybe spam all 
your friends)
      Flixter got slashdotted recently
        http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/26/0320210
      The discussion at The Internet Patrol has some good points as well as 
the usual noise.
         http://tinyurl.com/3c9b4t
         http://www.theinternetpatrol.com.nyud.net:8080/is-flixster-a-big-
           fat-spammer-are-they-hacking-your-aol-or-hotmail-address-book

  privacy issues
    read the fine print before signing up for anything
    if you see a "tell a friend" link, please forget that I'm your friend
      You will be giving some marketer info about me
      Please send me the URL via direct email with a few of your words


-- 
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.