Archive for March, 2008

Slicing and dicing with Slicehost

Nothing against the fine folks at 34sp.com, but I fancied a bit of a change.

So ‘insignificant.org’ and another pet project were packaged up into boxes, padded with straw, loaded onto a van marked “SCP Removals” and driven all the way to slicehost. It took less than two minutes, from placing the order, to receive a (very!) brief email with details of my new IP address and root password. And now we’re rocking virtual hosts with nginx, php, and a handful of mongrels for Rails.

Anyway. Slicehost really are the mutts-nuts, and I’m happy to spam the blog with a delicious and nutritious Slicehost referral link.

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : Mar 18th, 2008

Fortnightly cron jobs

I’m doing regular nightly backups to rsync.net, and recently made changes to the way that backups are done. I now keep the last seven daily snapshots (labelled “d-1″ to “d-7″) and another snapshot every fortnight. But that fortnightly snapshot needed a fortnightly cron job.

Here’s the entry in my crontab:

 #Mins   Hours   Days    Months  Day of the week
 30      02      *       *       0       expr `date +\%W` \% 2 > /dev/null || /home/matthew/scripts/fortnightly.sh

This was inspired by this post on the interweb, with a slight necessary modification: the two percent signs need to be escaped for the job to run properly with Vixie cron, Ubuntu Gutsy’s default cron.

And this new backup routine is made all the better when the backup filesystem at rsync.net is made available as a mount over sshfs. :)

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Filed under tech : Comments (1) : Mar 16th, 2008