Sore throat and the voice of a frog - not good. It just keeps getting worse day by day until this morning I feel as if my throat is swollen shut completely - it hurts to drink, even. I''ll try some soup later. We are supposed to game Sunday - I will likely miss it. I worked several hours OT Monday and Tuesday, took part of it yesterday in the icy conditions. I went in to work 2 hrs late & left 1.5 hrs early because I felt so bad.

We got the backup server working fine - I learned a few things about rsync, one of which is VERY important:

If you rsync the root and several mounted volumes on the root, you MUST exclude them when rsyncing the root!

For example:
/dev/hda1 /
/dev/hda2 /opt
/dev/hda3 /usr

/opt and /usr are empty folders that DO exist on the / volume as mount points for the two volumes.

The rsync of / will backup the empty folders if you do not exclude them

Then when you rsync /opt and /usr, it works fine - but now those folders have data in them on the target.

When you repeat the rsync of /, likely the next day or week, it detects the data in those folders and deletes it all, as there is no data in the source...

This assumes you are using the following command or something like it:

rsync -ax --delete / /mnt/storage/servername/.

the x tells it not to follow links or mounts to other file systems, and the --delete tells it to delete files on the target that do not exist on the source - a true mirror of the source.

In any event, resolved a few issues, watched the sync work as it should.


I also converted a user from Netscape 7 to Outlook XP. Why are there NO tools to convert mail or contacts from Netscape 7 to Outlook? TO get the contacts, I had to export them into LDIF, then import them into outlook express, then import them into Outlook XP. How stupid is that? The only way to get the mail is by installing Netscape 4, manually copying the mail files into the Net4 directory structure, then opening Net4 to convert the files to Net4 format. After that, open Outlook Express, import them from Net4, then export to MS format, which can be read by Outlook XP.

I would think that Microsoft would be falling all over itself to come up with easy, fast ways to convert from Netscape 7. With it as hard as it is, I would think that many people simply wouldn't change!