Not always to others, but I have files like photos,  old websites I developed, exam work, TV shows I’ve recorded (OMG it’s illegal, it was on a VHS tape too) on my drives, which I migrate to every new PC I purchase, it’s been 4 or 5 since 1996 (I’m 26 next week, that’s 14 years using PC’s.

I’ve got a few TB’s of data, not massive, there’s people I know who download all day every day. But here’s my tips for protecting your data:

Tip 1 – Protect your Hard Drives from Heat

I learned the hard way in the 2002, all 3 of my hard drives failed due to heat stress, I had a small room, a computer that was constantly on, it’s a bit like having a radiator on during the summer months, it was 30 degrees and more in the summer in that room.

After losing all my data and having to restore what I had left from CD-R backups, I realised the drives didn’t have adequate airflow in the hard drive cages of old (all squished together in the 3.5 inch bays), so I mounted them in the wider 5 1/4 bays where most people had their cd drives, I had a few spare slots, so it was fine. Saying that, even some modern cases still squish all the drives into a small space.

A few years later, I found some hard drive coolers, they also seem to work, I’ve not had a hard drive failure since 2002..until this week May 9th 2010. I have a Dell XPS, it has 6x hard drives in, and as you might guess, the hard drives are all crammed together, there’s no air space around them, a Western Digital Raptor 10k rpm drive failed me, which is a high quality drive, so it shows that, constant above average heat will kill drives.

So, do whatever you can to keep your hard drives cool, install fans, use rails and mount them in the optical bases, and put as many screws into them as you can, if you only use 2 screws, you’ll get an uneven transfer of heat through them to the case, which can act as a passive heat sink to some effect, water cooling is ace if you can afford it.

Tip 2 – Raid 1 is a must

All my data is mirrored, and so is the operating system.  I have two 1.5Tb hard drives set-up with Raid 1, okay so I’m losing 1.5Gb of storage capacity by mirroring the drives, but if I have a hard drive failure, my data won’t be lost, if you lose a single drive in Raid 0, you lose everything on both drives, keep than in mind when you’re looking for a slightly faster setup, I personally don’t feel it’s worth it for my data.

My second raid array is four Hard Drives, they were 10,000 RPM Western Digital 160Gb raptors, which is where my operating system and applications reside. I initially tried raid 5, but I found it far too slow for every day use as well as gaming, whilst you get more room to store data, it really is slow, slower than mirroring due to the way raid works, I do accept it depends on the raid controller.

Raid Controllers generally pass the hard work to the CPU (I have 4 cores, so not a big deal) when the raid is embedded in the motherboard, and on low end (less than £100 usually) controllers, it’s only the high end corporate cards that can actually do the hard work on the raid card without taxing the cpu, sometimes up to 5% cpu usage I’ve noticed on my 2.93Ghz quad core (it’s getting old now), typically it’s one or two percent through normal use.

So after Raid 5, I went for Raid 1 + 0, which is mirroring and striping, without going too techy about how data is patterned on each drive, all you need to know is, with four drives, 2 drives have cloned data (mirrored), and 2 drives end up with the data spanned across both in a way to increase performance.

Okay, so you already know I favour redundancy over the space the extra 2 drives could offer, but the striping also gives increased performance, which is worth it in my opinion.

This setup was put to the test this week, I had a hard drive (a raptor) fail, when I turned my PC on it said (degraded array), so I had to work out which drive was broken, the Nvidia app tells you the usb channel (so the bios on my board), I did it the easy way, the drive wasn’t powering on, so I just put my index finger against the side of each when I powered the system on, to feel the vibrations of the drive, second touch I found an abnormal one, I could feel it clicking…

So I pulled it, and stuffed a 7 year old 300Gb drive in (it’s bigger than the raptors, and much slower, but I’ll look into buying more drives soon, it will be fine until then), went into the Nvidia Storage Application, and told it to rebuild the array onto the new disc.

It looks like this:

Click to have a look.

So clarify:

• My Computer never stopped working. (no downtime apart from a reboot or two)
• I never Lost any Data. (the mirroring and striping had the redundancy to keep my data safe)
• I was able to build the array onto a spare drive (identicle drives are needed unless the spare is a bit bigger in capacity).
• I’ll be able to upgrade my drives to a higher capacity by pulling one out and replacing them 1 by one, and asking for a rebuild each time.

In my opinion, Raid 1 is a must for everyone who hates having to reinstall their OS and copy their data back from backups…yes, you should do those 2, I have an External 500Gb drive, which I clone my OS to as well, just in case my Raid fails, or more likely, Windows decides to have a hissy fit.

Keep your drives cool, build redundancy in (drives are cheap enough nowadays), and backup (which I’ll leave to another post).

(this article is provided “As Is”, and you use it as your own risk, such as using your fingers to feel the hard drives vibrate, or installing screws in your drives).

If in doubt, get an IT technician or engineer to do the work for you.

The good thing is, once you’ve modified your genuine xp disk, you’ve got a personal version that’s very useful for reinstallations on that machine.

Here is how you do it:

1.) Download Nlite from this website: http://www.nliteos.com/download.html
2.) Install it, we all know the drill, point click, point click, done.
3.) Run Nlite, it looks something like this:

3.) Insert your Genuine copy of Windows XP, it will ask you for a location to copy the files to on your hdd (typically 5-600mb of files)

4.) Choose the Tasks “Drivers” & “Create ISO”. Click Next

5.) If you’ve not downloaded the drivers you want to slipstream you should do it now. Normally they come compressed in an archive, you need to extract it, and verify there is a Setup Information File (.inf).
6.) Choose your Driver, if there are multiples, use that option and it will add them all, PNP and Text files can be a bit hit and miss, there is probably a way to choose which one is required, but I don’t make these discs very often…once a year maybe. You’ll have to experiment. You can always try adding the same driver with both options.

7.) Insert a Blank CDR and Choose Direct Burn after the ISO has been created.  If you have time I would suggest using the verify option to make sure the data has been written to the disc accurately. Click Burn

8.) Watch the progress bar, or get a Cuppa, it should say “Write Successful” when it’s completed.
9.) Insert your new custom XP CDR and everything should work…hopefully

/etc/pure-ftpd.conf

You can edit the file like so:

The normal limit is actually 20, so I’m not sure why Cpanel have opted for it to be so low. There is actually a server wide setting of max clients, so technically, 2-3 users could reach this limit, so it might be an idea to increase this value as well.

To be honest, looking there didn’t really help me, cause I’m just arguing with myself about whether I should keep it simple, or have specific meanful categories and sub-categories. Then about 5 seconds later I think, I doubt most people care, as long as the posts are grouped together into categories that make sense. Then my GUI developer taps on me on the shoulder saying, people should be able to find what they want within a couple of clicks.

I will state, this is my Personal Blog, and it’s not just going to be about technology, internet development, it will include my personal thoughts, maybe comments on sports, who knows. Anyway…here goes, quickfire draft 1:

• Computing & IT
• Everyday Life
• Entertainment
• Science & Technology
• Travel & Events
• News and Politics
• Ideas and Thoughts
• Pick and Mix

Okay that was easy, I took some (okay a lot) of the youtube categories. Here’s something that annoys me, surely “Comedy”, “Gaming”, “Sport”, “Music” is actually a form of “Entertainment”. They all overlap horribly, even “Cars and Vehicles” could actually be posted under “News and Politics” if it’s something current like “Fuel Prices reach £2 a Gallon”, I predict that within the next 10 years, you heard it here first.

You know, I’m going to stop there, cause I’ve realised you can’t categorise life that easily, in fact, I now understand why people get paid a lot of money just choosing what category a post should be published under…wait..they are glorified libarians. If you’ve been to a library, you’ll often find a book you want is actually under a section you wouldn’t expect…someone has to make tough choices thats for sure, and you definetely can’t please everyone, like me.

There’s no draft 2 for now….maybe when I’ve written a few hundred articles I might come back and look at this, and say, what the hell was I thinking.

First thing we do is visit the official iftop website and download the rpm for redhat.

http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/iftop/

If you scroll down, you’ll find the latest version. At the time of writing this I used the following command from my secure shell prompt:

Then I tried to install it:

No luck, it requires a dependency called:  libpcap. So I did a search using yum for it:

Bingo, found libpcap.i386. So I tell yum to install it for me.

Turns out it’s already installed, so I tried the development library for good measure, no difference. Then I tried this command:

The file I need “libpcap.so.0.6.2″ is actually located here: /usr/lib/libpcap.so.0.9.4

As you can see, it’s the wrong version, so I’m going to create a link to it.

Still couldn’t install it via rpm -i….so time to try with no dependencies:

Try running iftop by typing this:

Good Luck!

A command prompt try some of the examples I list below:

This shows all the parameters you can supply the “du” command with. Typical combinations I use are as follows:

You can muck around with displaying it in Megabytes (-m), Bytes (-b), but there are limitations, like files under 1Mb get shown as 1Mb…
Another alternative I came across is:

If you’re interested in display usage a partition level, try the following commands:

I had already tried out the Captcha module for a few months, but the module was buggy at the time (I believe it was a quick port from drupal 5), and fixes generally involved core hacks so I wasn’t keen on that at the time, I can’t remember the exact reason, it might come back to me…and I’ll edit this. In fact looking back, the module still hasn’t been updated regularly for a while, although there is a new Beta Release Candidate (3) that came out yesterday (7th of april 2009), and the previous release was 2008-Apr-11 2008…almost a year, you get my point.

Anyway, I came across the Mollom module, which putting it simply, sends your content through the mollum servers for analysis, and either gives your site submissions the thumbs or down. It’s pretty damn accurate, here are some figures from their website:

Mollom is currently protecting 7,367 active websites. The average efficiency is 99.95%. This means that only 5 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught. Mollom has caught 51,266,317 spam messages since it started. Today we caught 437,408 spam messages. On average, 85% of all messages are spam.

You can view their statistics scorecard here

Additionally, the module worked with drupal 6 pretty much flawlessly, and was a 15 minute installation. That’s damn nice considering how effective it has been on one of the sites I maintain, check out the module statistics (you can make this available via the drupal permissions system).

I will point out, if your website grows, you will probably run into a situation where you have to upgrade to a mollum plus account, which is 1 EURO a roughly, considering it’s killing tons of spam, with hardly any false positives, I’d happily pay for it. You can view more details of their pricing model here.

The Mollom Module for Drupal 6 is configurable as well, you can choose either Text Analysis, Captcha or Both.  You can see how it looks from an admin perspective here:

Now, I don’t generally expect a FREE service to be available 100% of the time, but so far, the mollom service hasn’t had any noticeable outtages for me. However, they included a fallback system, so if their Text Analysis service is unavailable, it falls back to Captcha mode, which is nice, so it’s not going to hang my site waiting for an external service which doesn’t answer. You can see the config settings for that and the area where you enter your api keys (I’ve deleted the keys from the pic, but you get the idea) here:

I’m not alone in my thumbs up, check out some further testimonials here.

Shows all the variations in content placement.

I’ve modified the really cool 960 grid system, 16 column, so it works with smaller margins as I found them a little large on some sites.
My version has 2px margins, it appears to work fine in most browsers without issue as well.
I’ve also created a photoshop file so you can create your own artwork.
Download here: 960 grid 16-column 2x2px margin zip package