Backup a minute..

Ok.. another yawner of a post but hey that is me. I am working on process of backing up the VM's in an environment and making it as quick to recover as possible. In my search I ran across a product called esXpress v3.1. It is pretty cool (ok as cool as VM software can be). It does a couple things:

1. It will put a VM into "Snapshot Mode" and then perform a backup of the VMDK.
2. It can put the VMDK backup to SMB/FTP or SSH.
3. After it is done it will remove the snapshot.

THIS IS DONE WHILE THE VM IS RUNNING! HOW COOL IS THAT!

Oh and I did not mention the best part. The software is FREE! Now there are additonal features such as being able to make backups local and remote at the same time, having additional helper machines, encryption and other things.

Check it out at www.esxpress.com

My Friend CRON...

OK another dry post but hey.. this is not the Life and Times of Someone Exciting.. sorry. I was at work minding my own business when I realized that my little automated email was not there waiting in my inbox from several servers on Mondays when I came in. (Maybe it had a "Case of the Mundays" as described in the movie Office Space) Computers are like Marines. They are not supposed to choose what orders they follow and what ones they do not. I began to investigate.


Looking into the cron log (/var/log/cron) I noticed that NONE of the CRON jobs were running. I am on to something. I looked into the messages log and sure enough there was an entry "Authentication token is not longer valid; new one required". Clear as mud, of course. So I went to the worlds User Manual.. Google. It showed that there was an issue with the root user id. Huh? I just used it. Logging into the console with the root user id, I was greeted with a message that the id was aged out and would have to be changed! I DID NOT GET THIS WHEN I SU to the ROOT ACCOUNT! I changed the password and restarted the crond service. All good now..

As usual, I hope someone benefits from my stupidity.