Is it just me or has .NET fallen off the face of the Earth? Admittedly I don’t go out looking for .NET news, but I skim through 10 or so different technology news websites daily, and I just realized that I haven’t seen any news about any developments in .NET for a long time. Maybe several months. Is .NET falling out of favor with the Microsoft folk? Is there something new coming along as a replacement?
Sun’s Schwartz says Project Vector may be worlds largest app store (for Java apps)
We haven’t heard much coming out of Sun for a while since they are in negotiations with Oracle over their take over. Jonathan Schwartz recently blogged about a few interesting things though, including mention of Project Vector, which aims to be an apps store for Java apps, similar to the iPhone apps store and all the other branded stores that are popping up on every handheld platform. Sun get an immense volume of traffic coming to their sites looking for info on the Java platform, so this may be a way to stir up come cash flow from their prize jewel technology.
Apple Macs may soon be coming to a WalMart near you?
WalMart is busy upgrading their electronics departments in a move that some say is part of a move to get Apple interest and allow them to sell Macs on their shelves, possible in a style similar to Best Buy with their Apple store within a store approach. WalMart already carry iPhones and iPods, so Macs may be next.
Recovering from a server hard drive crash – lost 1 year of data from bad backups!
My home Linux server that I run this site on had it’s hard drive die last week. I found out that my weekly db backups had not been copying the MySQL dumps to the zip drive in the server, and the last one that was on the zip disk was ONE YEAR AGO.
Ok, lesson learnt here – CHECK YOUR BACKUPS! It’s one thing have a backup strategy in place, but it’s another thing to actually check your back ups to make sure they are good! The annoying thing in this case is I know the weekly MySQL dumps were running on a cron job, but they were all stored on the same drive that failed… not much good there.
Next lesson – Acronis True Image is awesome. I had a complete image of the drive that I was able to restore to a new disk. I took that image after the last substantial changes to the server, so didn’t lose any server setup.
Next lesson learnt – restoring a drive image to a completely different hard disk setup…. NIGHTMARE getting GRUB to boot Linux. Probably should have tested this before. Using VirtualBox though I was able to restore the image to a virtual drive and run a virtual copy of my server from the last backup. Completely awesome and a life saver.
Next lesson: Cheap RAID cards are most likely cheap because they are ‘fake RAID’ and rely on OS drivers to provide RAID support. I bought 2 new Hitachi Deskstar 250GB drives and set them up in a RAID 1 config (mirroring) for some degree of fault tolerance. Found out that the mirroring was not doing anything. Abandoned the H/W config on the card and set it up in Ubuntu software RAID config instead – excellent instructions here on how to do that.
So my server’s now back up. Time to look into FTP’ing weekly backups to some online hosted backup service instead….total time spent restoring backups, reconfiguring the server, reinstalling software – about 12 hours, but lost over 1 years worth of blog posts and technical articles on my site…