Posts made by matteo nunziati

@scottalanmiller wow! it is not so easy in my area! BTW is Ubiquiti good stuff? how it is comparable to dlink, hp ? where is it positioned?

@ntoxicator I think he is grabbing a temp snapshot and then he tar.gz's the snap to the destination (e.g. an NFS mount). Then the snap is destroyed, otherwise you get worse and worse on performance.

@scottalanmiller what I wanted to say is that DevOps (as a technique, do not mind about the phylosophy) is mostly about scripting everything from the ground up.

Stateless/stateful is mostly a mindset in back up: restore a VM is always stateless, the stateful bit is if you have to restore datasets in it, which is, to my opinion, a second and decoupled step.

even security patches is mostly of a nightmare on windows but just an apt/yum away in linux.

very ofter people refer to stateless VMs/containers when they can simply respawn in a cloud env when they die, but provisioning (e.g. setting up right config files) is always there, even in a docker conf file.

Let state this differently. My way of "old" disaster recovery:
1- create a new VM
2- install the OS on it
3- setup all the required config/services

optionally for stateful servers/VMs/containers:
4- restore the latest data snapshot

in DevOps steps 1 to 3 are still there but you use a deploy/provision script being it vagrant+ansible or something more complex.

Maybe step 4 can even be scripted here. but DevOps is this: just script everything.

The added value of this is that you can re-run the script as you want and if a local basis is available (say local ISO, local cache for apt/yum), things can be really fast. This lowers the barrier to testing disaster scenarions.

But a lot of infrastructure must be there. and discipline/quality insurrance. Both of which very often an SMB lacks.

the same can be obtained on a physical machine if you keep images with tools like clonezilla etc...

also kolourpaint4

nowdays I can only listen to music when I'm alone in my car: I've an mp3 collection on an usb pen. Not allowed to listen to music in office, can't listen to it when I'm with my wife and daughter... I'm unable to listen to music and do sport: I'll end following music rhythm and not the required one.
Basically I've music only on commutations.

mmm... I think DevOps is not related to back up a stateless or stateful OS. I mean: any OS is stateless and apps can run with a bunch of config files setup. having a proper data backup solution decoupled from configs and from OS make things simple.

This is what I'm used to do:

1- OS: (ok the entire VM) backup now and then like 1 in a week, just in case something destroys the functionality
2- apps config: track changes wherever you want, from txt to a proper DevOps playbook (something simply I don't do)
3- data: backup as fast as possible. <- THIS IS ACTUALLY THE STATEFUL PART.

I'm really a fan of application level backup. I mean that if you have a DB let the DB backup its own data, do not do cool differential hourly VM image backups with huge retention windows. NO, never. I dislike this. Do data backups instead: they are simply more efficent.

In case of disaster recovery what I try to do is:
1- restart from the latest OS point,
2- if nothing in the config is changed in from last OS backup (trak your config changes) this is ok, else patch config.
3- Then restore latest dataset, no differential stuff, simply erase data and restore them.

What I see in DevOps is that you should script points 1 and 2 without use the latest OS point: create a plain VM image and do all the config programmatically so that you do not need to restore anything in the VM/app setup: simply create the VM from scratch everytime like you would do with vagrant!

then you still need to add the "stateful" bit if you have it, that is, restore the dataset, via app native procedures.

Unfortunately it seems that this solution (app level backup) is not perceived as a good practice, as anyone wants huge differential VM backups at block level. I think because they are easier to manage in case of hurry: just apply some automatic procedure to restore blocks as a huge "file", don't mind about internals.

ever tried pinta as per this thread?

@scottalanmiller , all

hello.

I'm an almost 40 yo guy from Italy. Had a career as machine vision consultant, then I've started to work for a SMB (50 people including warehouse) in the glass market.

It's 1 year since I've started the job. In theory the tech office of the company asked for a coder, but it emerged out that they have no IT staff, no IT at all (but a xeon ws running as a server) and I've started scratching my head in order to remove the huge chaos in the company.

Basic knowledge on linux and kvm, mostly a coder in Python and C++. Always struggling with the "IT-is-just-a-cost" and "do-it-ourselves-will-cost-less" mood in a 13.000.000 € revenue company.

Recently I've started reading spiceworks, where I've met some of the guys who also post here (notably SAM). Then started looking at some posts here too!

@stacksofplates maybe of interest: my libvirt backup wrapper

I think they will sell software apps and appliances with windows on it. I think they will move to the SaaS/Cloud model when it fits, while proposing "bundles" with windows for other apps on the client side - say surface-like stuff.

Server side they are already exporting their applications to other platforms where they can't offer a cloud alternative.

In the end I think they will be less the windows company and more an application company. They are going really strong in certain enviroments, think about SQL, NAV, Office and the so...

Still curious about their involvement in the IoT.

just finished to check out my company (30 ppl with pc, plus 20 in the warehouse). We have around 500GB of data excluding mail. Mail is a huge archive kept for both hystoric and legal reasons. This can go well over 500GB, but this is a static batch of data we do not change.