Career Guidance Posts

I’m having fun with 2 posts by Guy Kawasaki wrt/ Penelope Trunk’s Career Guidance Points. These are not your standard answers. I like them.

• Ten Questions With Penelope Trunk: Career Guidance for This Century
• The Nine Biggest Myths of the Workplace by Penelope Trunk

My favorite is the “Glass Ceiling”.

Myth: The glass ceiling still exists.

The glass ceiling is over, not because people crashed through, but because people are not looking up. Life above the glass ceiling is 100-hour weeks, working for someone else, and no time for friends and family. And it’s not only women who are saying no to the ladder up: Men are as well. People want to customize success for themselves, not climb someone else rungs. So if no one is climbing to the top, the glass ceiling isn’t keeping anyone down.

On my front — I get asked this kind of question all the time. I goes like “I’m a middle manager, I make more money than I dreamed of, but I have no time for anything else. My boss(es) want me to step up, but “up” looks like a life I don’t want to have”. Penelope nails it.

Mac Mozy - Internet Backup

As part of my backup plan I figured that I’d put really important stuff on the net. It would be great to put everything on the net, but the upload speed is too limiting. I have a 10-down & 1-up connection. Thus I opted for BackupPC as the main backup platform and am trying Mac Mozy for the “net” part.

So far — I installed Mac Mozy Beta. It is very easy to do and the configuration wizard is great. I had one hiccup. Their service people returned my e-mail the same day. Can’t do much better than that

BackupPC on Mac OS X - part 2

Here are some Mac OS X specific items for BackupPC install. They include: configuring Apache, enabling root, and setting up the hosts file. Hope this helps. Enjoy

Apache

I found this the most challenging part of the install. The main challenge was simply overcoming the intimidation created by seeing all the configuration options in “httpd.conf” and hoping that I could make the right choices without having to spend hours getting up to speed. I ended up on the hours side because Mac OS X is slightly different than Linux installs. Not much, but for the first timer it was enough

BackupPC uses Apache which is included with OS X and is enabled by selecting “Personal Web Sharing” in System Preferences. Note that the OS X version is configured in a “slightly” different way than for Linux examples I found on the net. Specifically “cgi-bin” and “Documents” are stored in “/Library/WebServer”.

It looks like this in the Apache config file (/etc/httpd/httpd.conf)

DocumentRoot “/Library/WebServer/Documents”
<Directory “/Library/WebServer/Documents”>

All the alias’ need to point to this directory as well. This is in the <IfModule mod_alias.c> section.

Alias /manual/ “/Library/WebServer/Documents/manual/”
<Directory “/Library/WebServer/Documents/manual”>
Options Indexes FollowSymlinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ “/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/”
<Directory “/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables”>
AllowOverride None
Options None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

The main point is that BackupPC config.pl requires the user to specify this location and on the Mac it is different than for Linux/Unix.

The second point is that BackupPC wants the user to “login”. This can be done with .htaccess files or via modification of the httpd.conf file. I modified the httpd.conf file by adding the following to the end of the file. I Also commented out the previous setting for “user” and “group” which are set to “www” by default. For some reason I was not able to get the .htaccess file method to work. (Nov 2 edit … I have now got .htaccess to work for users. I found this very helpful http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/auth.html )

user backuppc
group www

ServerName “YOUR_SERVER_NAME”
<Directory /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/>
AuthName “Backup Admin”
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /Library/WebServer/.htpasswd
Require valid-user
</Directory>

Enabling Root

This is done via the “NetInfo Manager Utility” — /Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager

Enabling /etc/hosts

Edit /etc/hosts directly via “root” or use the following to load it into NetInfo database. Here is an example:

$ sudo niload hosts . <<EOF

> 192.168.1.101 hostname2

> EOF

$

– Added June 26 –

RsyncP

I’ve been using rsync as the transport and it requires installation of perl module RsyncP. The File::RsyncP module is available from http://perlrsync.sourceforge.net or CPAN.

SSH Keys

this howto really helped me with ssh set up. The other gotcha with Mac is that ssh needs to be enabled via System Preferences. System Preferences -> Sharing -> Remote Login

System Preferences -> Sharing -> Remote Login

BackupPC on Mac OS X - part 1

I posted a few weeks ago that I bought a backup book. I’ve finally installed BackupPC on my OS X Mac (v 10.4.9), performed my first few backups, and tested the restore functions. So far I’m still feeling good about my choice. The application has lots of features and is fairly friendly from the web interface.

For the future I’ve still got a fair bit to learn about all the features available and come to terms with the the time required to backup my >200GBs of machines. On the time side, I’m using rsync with no compression and get ~ 8MB/sec or 28.8G per hour

On the installations side, I have to say that it is was not pain free. It requires a fair bit of comfort with the UNIX command line. Suffice it to say that I have a lot of rust in UNIX and PERL land so it took me a while to wade through it.

The BackupPC site at source forge is a good place to download the package, but I found the following two “howto’s” very very helpful. Overall, the install requires turning on “Personal Web Sharing”, turning on “Remote Login”, enabling root, configuration of Apache, configuration of SSH connections between clients and server, configuring /etc/hosts, install of rsyncP Perl module, and then one gets to play with the BackupPC configuration. Each is a small modification, but this is a lot for one with “rust”.

Here are 2 helpful “howto’s” and a link to BackupPC Users Forum that cover most of the installation details.

• http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_backuppc
• http://www.adminsparadise.com/walkthroughs/backup-server/backup-server.html
• BackupPC Users Forum

In a following post … I’ll detail some of the Mac specific items not covered in these Linux Howto’s.

Music Update

I found it very tough to listen to new music last month. This has a lot to do with all the great music I’ve purchased earlier in year and that I got into one of my Neil Young grooves again

I’ve been on endless rotation of Massey Hall 1971 for almost 2 months.

Artists that snuck in during my NY-MH-1971 groove were

• Menomena - http://www.myspace.com/menomena
  • like “wet and rusting” — tip to Eric on these guys
  • 
• Jarvis Cocker - http://myspace.com/jarvspace
  • like “black magic”
  • 
• Modest Mouse - http://www.myspace.com/modestmouse
  • like “fire it up” and “missed the boat”
  • this was not an easy album to like on first listen .. took a while
  • 
• Honorable Mentions to: The Ponys, Graham Parker, Andrew Bird, Grinderman, Blonde Redhead.

Lot’s of Reading Lately

For some reason I go on a reading binge early in the year.

Corporate Front

• Long Tail - Chris Anderson — worth reading … the concept is simple, but Chris’ numerous examples really flesh it out.
• Leadership and the New Science - Marg Wheatley — very good.
• The No Asshole Rule - Robert I. Sutton — very good.
• Dealing With Darwin, Geoffrey Moore ( here is a post applying it to PMCS in the 90’s )
  • I really like this extension of the “Crossing the Chasm” model. Moore’s models provide a great platform from which one can describe, discuss, and then act. The good news is that he has covered the whole life cycle from start to finish. The bad news is that this is now a big model which requires a lot of work
• Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change - Clayton M. Christensen, etc
  • still in progress. his books are great.

Health front

I’ve been doing a lot of work with meditation over the past 2 years. I didn’t do any reading on the subject until this year. I still find that the practice really works, but that reading about it is not always straightforward.

• Luminous Mind: Fundamentals of Spiritual Practice (Paperback), Kyabje Kalu Rinpoche
  • The second half of this book is very readable. I found it very helpful in understanding the developmental path of a meditator. I’m sure glad that I didn’t read this until now. I needed to be familiar with the concepts and jargon first.
• Bodhisattva Mind: Teachings to Cultivate Courage and Awareness in the Midst of Suffering - Pema Chodron
  • This is a great listen. It is a tape of a conference in Boulder, CO. Pema displays great skill in mapping Buddhist concepts into the mindset of USA (and the west ).

Fun

• Lamb - Christoper Moore Way too much fun What did Jesus do during those missing 30 years. Chris Moore makes up an entertaining version. Christian purists might want to avoid this.
• Golf of Your Dreams - Bob Rotella What is Spring without reading a Bob Rotella book?
• Charlie Bone and the Invisible Boy - Jenny Nimmo — not Harry Potter, but will do until the Deathly Hallows comes out

I’m certain that I’ve missed something .. but I’ve been putting this off for too long .. ’tis now done

The Digital Family Roadtrip

We did our annual deep freeze trip to the “cabin” this weekend. Always puts us in a good mood and brings out the cheery tunes and a fun book

On Tunes

It was great to be singing along to old favorites from They Might Be Giants Flood Album

The kids (and I) love it all, especially “Particle Man” and “Whistling in the Dark”.

Moxy Fruvous’s “King of Spain” also came back for it’s zillionth rotation.

Books

We’ve been going thru the Jenny Nimmo Children of the Red King series. We finished book three “The Invisible Boy (or blue boa)” this time. Very fun.

Did I Mention That I Bought A Backup Book

I’ve been really struggling with the ideal set up for my network backup. There are sooooo many options.

Should I live with Retrospect (my solution last year), use one the many solutions reviewed recently by MacWorld (SuperDuper, Carbon Copy, Data Backup, or Tri-Backup), try Mac Mozy, write some rsync scripts ( my current solution), experiment with Amazon S3, or use open source backup.

I’ve always had good luck with O’Reilly books so I figured that I should buy a book on the topic. Their latest is Backup & Recovery by W. Curtis Preston

The book is a great resource. I’m glad I bought it. It definitely highlighted the error in my choosing simple rsync scripts. There is a section that reviews open source solutions. Specifically, Amanda, BackupPC, Bacula, Rsnapsnot, Rdiff-backup, and Rsync snapshots. I’ve linked all the chapters that are available free on his wiki.

So far it looks like BackupPC should be a great solution for my needs. My main criterion is that I can do a network backup of all my families PCs and accounts. I can’t count on them to backup their stuff.

Now I’ve just got to get it to work

Not Worthy :-(

There was a time ( a long time ago ) when I worked with UNIX everyday. That was then

I’ve been trying to install BackupPC onto my Mac for most of the day.

It seemed so simple in the Backup and Recovery Book

Little did I know that I’d have to dig into Apache to configure usage of CGI scripts

It’s all simple … but there are too many simple things for my “rusty” head.

Golf and Defibrillators

My friend Kevin often jokes that he doesn’t know whether he joined a golf club or a seniors home I can’t argue with him on this point. In this months club newsletter I learned that Defibrillators will be located in the “Bar” and in the “Pro Shop”. I’m guessing that this is standard practice.

Two Defibrillators Purchased — Being prepared for an emergency at our facility is uppermost in the minds of the Board Of Directors, Management and Staff. Seymour has recently purchased two Automatic Electronic Defibrillators (AED’s). One will be located in the Clubhouse at the Grill Room Bar and the other will be located in a wall cabinet outside the Pro Shop. Effective May 2nd we will have three Clubhouse Staff and all Professional Staff in the Pro Shop trained in the use of these AED’s.