Interlinux Blog

The project has moved the IETF-ID from DIAP to LTASP. Long-Term Archive Storage Protocol disambiguates Distributed Internet Archiving Protocol. More accurately describing the aims of the project. The name of DIASER, this GPL software product, will not change. Abstract taken from: http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-brasher-ltasp-02.txt

Long-term archiving storage fundamentally begins with archive data Accumulation, then Replication and then Management. Using A->R->M, LTASP has been created to solve mid-range and below, long-term archiving requirements of the small-medium enterprise. Where tape has been deployed in the past, LTASP now offers an alternative solution designed to be more robust and manageable in the long term than network attached storage devices or simple disk storage alone.

Damian

…

‘DIR_B’         => { ARGCOUNT => ARGCOUNT_ONE, DEFAULT => “/home/” },
‘DIR_C’         => { ARGCOUNT => ARGCOUNT_ONE, DEFAULT => “/home/” },

# additional variables to cope with the Ubuntu (and other distros) forced
# use of sudo; if the USE_SUDO variable is positive then commands that
# require root access will use sudo with the -S switch,
# i.e. echo “root_password” | sudo -S command
# also the username of the account to connect to – instead of root -
# will be used: SUDO_ACCOUNT_NAME_{node}
‘USE_SUDO’      => { ARGCOUNT => ARGCOUNT_ONE, DEFAULT => “0″ },
‘SUDO_ACCOUNT_NAME_A’ => { ARGCOUNT => ARGCOUNT_ONE, DEFAULT => “usera” },
‘SUDO_ACCOUNT_NAME_B’ => { ARGCOUNT => ARGCOUNT_ONE, DEFAULT => “userb” },
‘SUDO_ACCOUNT_NAME_C’ => { ARGCOUNT => ARGCOUNT_ONE, DEFAULT => “userc” },

# user defined variables for the DIASER filling mechanism / fill_diaser.pl
‘FILL_START_TIME’   => { ARGCOUNT => ARGCOUNT_ONE, DEFAULT => “10″ },
‘VOLUME_DIR’    => { ARGCOUNT => ARGCOUNT_ONE, DEFAULT => “/mnt/bkp/” },
‘DIFF_CONST_PREFIX’ => { ARGCOUNT => ARGCOUNT_ONE, DEFAULT => “diff” },

…

DIASER is the GPL software product, there are no plans to make DIAP a software product.

http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-brasher-diap-11.txt

Abstract

DIAP has been created to solve mid-range and below, long term
archiving requirements of the small medium enterprise.  Where tape
has been deployed in the past, DIAP now offers an alternative
solution designed to be more robust and manageable in the long term
than network attached storage devices or simple disk storage alone.
The system provides a well defined structure for storing and managing
long term archives.

I think this is a nice short example of some collaborative work written with the use of a mailing list; here is the thread where I proposed the initial SQL outline, from there it was modified then implemented:

http://www.hants.lug.org.uk/lurker/message/20090113.115628.7a17529e.en.html

GPL http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/ 2.0

#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Hampshire Linux Users Group meeting register of attendees.
# Executed once to define database and tables with constraints.
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
#DROP DATABASE bab_register;
CREATE DATABASE bab_register DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;

USE bab_register;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS attendee;
CREATE TABLE attendee (
id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
email VARCHAR(150),
member ENUM('yes','no') NOT NULL,
new_attendee ENUM('no','yes') NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (id)
) COMMENT "HLUG BaB meeting register Southampton Uni (ECS)";

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS macs;
CREATE TABLE macs (
id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
attendee_id INT NOT NULL,
mac VARCHAR(17) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (id),
FOREIGN KEY (attendee_id) REFERENCES attendee (id)
) COMMENT "MAC Address entries, more than one per attendee";

DIASER – beta-1, we are currently working on project sustainability, making contact with potential trial end users and project maintenance continues…

Vault Building

Read more about DIASER…

Gold railings and sea - Thessaloniki, Greece

I rather liked this one and felt inspired after walking along the promenade for an hour… Thessaloniki.

Rainbow in Nafplion

This was a lucky shot considering the weather… Nafplion.

I have just returned from a  trip which took me to Debrovnik, then to my final destination in Athens to stay with family, via Sarajevo, Belgrade and Thessaloniki. Planes, buses and trains. I took my Acer Aspire One, 110-Ab and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix to disk using the image transferred to a 1GiB USB memory stick the day before I left and used it out of the box. Download here. I usually use Fedora based operating systems for personal computing but need to stay familiar with modern Debian based distributions for development purposes so took this opportunity to test drive UNR. I’m familiar with the Debian environment.

My computing needs were minimal. I used Firefox, OOo Writer, F-Spot Photo Manager, Gimp, File Browser, Skype, the command line to make a few adjustments and a few games of Lango. I used numerous wireless facilities. My Camera is a Fujifilm F10 6.3 Mega Pixel and the direct USB connection worked without additional software and appeared as an external memory device simply accessible using the file browser.

Interface – there is no doubt the Ubuntu colour scheme has improved. The browns are more toned and the orange a better match for the browns. Coffee and chocolate with a little orange zest and smooth multi-coloured icons seem to work well together. Two years ago, I installed then removed Ubuntu after a few days due to the colour combination which I simply didn’t like. No problems this time. The desktop layout is intuitive and clear and made good use of the AA1 screen. I was happy to swap between applications using the task bar like icons located in the top left hand side of the screen. Applications are  easy to find. A niggle, it took me a few minutes to realise the grey scroll bar on the right existed.

Performance – Application start time was acceptable if a little on the hesitant side. Boot time is fine. The default sound server presented problems when I attempted to use Skype, much used on this trip, I was a little irritated that it took me two hours to make Skype work and had a poor Wifi link at the time. I was on holiday so did not want to spend a long time fixing this. As switching from PulseAudio sound server to ALSA in Sound Preferences did not fix Skype I simply broke PulseAudio by removing some of its key packages and re-installed Skype. Video in Skype no longer worked but I didn’t care as I was not planning to use video. Video still worked with Cheese Webcam Booth. Once Skype was working as long as the network connection was solid there were no more problems. I used some of my trip time, whilst based in Thessaloniki, to write a first draft of a short eBook about small development collaboration, which I plan to make available for sale soon. I wrote just over 10K words using the AA1 and OOo Writer in a couple of days. The screen size is an obvious drawback but UNR font rendering is clear and enabled me to craft the words comfortably. The AA1 screen is also exceptionally clear, one of the features I really like about these particular netbooks.

Network – Wireless worked well most of the time. One in three or four WLAN connections required a reboot and or a network restart. This may be a driver problem or due to the fact I used a number of WiFi clouds during the two week trip and the connection became, unscientifically ‘clogged’, too many low power WiFi clouds in the region? Perhaps a later edition of Netbook would have coped better, the Acer Aspire One, 110-Ab is one of the earliest models. Ubunutu supply an alternative proprietary driver, the use of this did not improve the connection, in fact WLAN stopped working completely when I enabled it, so I continued with the default. Wired LAN worked perfectly.

Power management – suspend worked, hibernate failed. But see this document for additional AA1 specific configuration; here a hibernate fix is described. The AA1 system fan was a little noisy at times, I know there are some scripts available to quieten the fan. I rather hoped this had been handled automatically. But the weather was really warm at times and I undertook most of my computing whilst drinking coffee in a cafe, so the extra noise was unnoticeable. AA1 froze only once during the whole trip, probably due to overheating. I always achieved the specified two hours battery life.

Applications – Very good selection for such a small installation image. I needed to additionally install Skype, Gimp and Java. Skype required a significant number of additional package dependencies, I used apt-get install from the command line and satisfied these after an hour. Most people will use the straightforward GUI package manager. Finding the right Java package took a little extra effort, I eventually used apt-get to install Java from the pre-defined multiverse package repository rather than the version downloaded directly from Sun. Adobe-flashplugin worked out of the box? I don’t have a history entry relating to the installation of adobe-flashplugin, it must have either been trivial to install or it was working out of the box. I needed Java Firefox plugin for the FaceBook photograph upload tool every few days for the duration of the trip. Automatic updates work well, as I often had a poor WiFi connection I disabled them for the duration of the trip as the pop-up messages became annoying each time I reconnected, two steps were required and this took about quarter of an hour to achieve, finding my way around the Administration and Preferences settings. As for the command line, I don’t often use sudo on a daily basis to execute commands as root, but as I was using the command line sparingly it did not matter.

Final Thoughts – I am sure the additional effort spent improving the colour scheme is paying and will continue to pay dividends. Not essential, depending on your skills and resources, but I would suggest tuning UNR for performance before embarking on a trip and perhaps taking additional time to ensure all the applications you need will work properly before travelling. I really like the fact UNR is available as a tiny 1GiB install image and installation is exceptionally simple, see this guide. The platform felt solid and served its purpose well. An elegant, lightweight solution for a reasonable initial investment of my time.

Get UNR here…

Also first posted on Hampshire Linux Users Group

Proactive archiving… an advanced disk based backup volume management system with triple redundancy for HE and SME. A quick and low-cost way to make an environment more robust and data more accessible by archiving in multiple places. This replication also provides fast retrieval of archived data from all node hosting locations. A Perl installer creates the system. The application provides a decentralised, self-contained and managed storage utility.

Nodes can be dedicated to storage or used for existing services over unused bandwidth. DIASER works in user space over SSH. The software is based on DIAP which is a storage architecture designed to structure months to years of long term sustainable archiving space including retrospective archiving.

The application is beta-1. Please download to evaluate and trial the software, currently being tested with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora 10. I aim to test with other Linux distributions as well as ActivePerl, freeBSD and MacOSX.

http://www.diaser.org.uk

Damian Brasher