Draconis Software Blog

It’s backup week at the Draconis blog! We all know the importance of keeping our files backed up (and us at Draconis spend a lot of time planning for disasters), but it can often be a tedious task to ensure backups run properly. Often, we put off setting up a good system until it’s too late. This week, I’ll be posting a new installment each day, showing you how to get your backup system implemented using rsync, a free, cross-platform file transmit tool.

Numerous commercial and free solutions exist for backing up your hard drives – some are even cross-platform. Many are great for the job they do – especially when it comes to burning DVDs or CDs of your important files. But if you’re like me, and you have multiple computers you use on a regular basis (each of which has files you’d like to save), then an automated backup solution, sent to a single computer, may be in order. I happen to have four different platforms to support: Linux, Solaris, Windows, and a Mac laptop. I’ve set up a system where I can sync all my important files to my Linux computer (which has copious amounts of disk space) and burn CD/DVDs on a regular basis. This article will explain how I set it up.

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Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day, which (sadly) comes about only once per year.  Take a minute to think of the sysadmins who you work with (if you aren’t one yourself!) and be sure to let them know how much you appreciate the hard work they do for you.  And if you’re a sysadmin: Thank you!

There are a number of things going down across the web to commemorate the day.  Digg is sponsoring a contest, called Sysadmin of the Year, which seeks to honor the most amazing sysadmin.  Be sure to check it out and nominate your amazing sysadmin (or yourself, if you’re amazing).

Of course, you’ll want to check out the sysadminday.com website (check out the gallery – I’ve been there!).

Boingboing.net has several links up to some great sysadmin day-inspired stuff (be sure to check out the UK Unix Users Group song).

Search-engine optimization has been all the rage ever since there were search engines – Google especially seems to be the most successful at spawning whole cottage industries around optimization (and with good reason – it’s far and away the most popular). As several have pointed out, making some simple changes to your pages, and getting into good habits, can have dramatic effects on the number of visitors to your site.

An article, 3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic, over at Performancing.com, takes a look at three aspects of your site and strategies to take to increase search-engine traffic: better copy, lots of links, and networking (the social kind). Some very good suggestions.

A Beginner’s Guide to SEO is available at SEOmoz.org. This very complete article gives a great list of items you should be aware of to best optimize your site (everything from avoiding broken links and minimized downtime, to meta tags and document organization). Another great link to check out from SEOMoz is the Page Strength tool.

As you become more serious about your search engine optimization (and as your web site grows), there’s going to come a time when you need better control over just what content is being indexed by web crawlers. Matt Cutts has an article, Bot Obedience: Herding Googlebot, on building a robots.txt file and other strategies for holding googlebot’s hand over at his blog (which has plenty of other great tips for SEO).

If you’re running a blog (and who isn’t these days?), then you’re going to want to check out this 5-part post called Getting Ranked (with tips on how your page URLs should be formatted, how to improve accessibility, etc). One blogger, Paul Stamatiou, followed these tips and found a marked increased in his web traffic.

Hopefully you found these articles useful. There’s a ton of other great stuff out there, so consider this a starting point. Getting better traffic from search engines isn’t complicated, but it does require a bit of work and plenty of common sense. Good luck!

Thought I’d take a minute to talk about the latest version of RSP we just released today, version 2.2. If you’re not already familiar with RSP, it’s a cross-platform server monitoring and analysis program (and, as of 2.2, now has hardware tracking) with a web interface. Systems administrators, webmasters, and just about anyone else who has a server can (and should) use a monitoring system like RSP so they know if there’s anything affecting their users’ performance.

For version 2.2, we’ve been focusing on a new aspect to the software: hardware tracking. Using the RSP agents, we’ve been able to collect an extensive amount of hardware information (CPU models, SCSI controllers, hard disk types, network cards, etc). This info can then be sorted and compared against other data. So why would this be useful? Consider a shop that has only a set amount of money to spend on upgrades: the best use of this money is for the systems that are most crucial to users’ performance: you can quickly see what hardware is installed on each of your crucial systems and decide what to upgrade. There are many other uses too, of course.

Additionally, we’ve added several new interface enhancements, including a new page for each individual server: kind of like a dashboard on a per-server basis. It shows the current performance, the hardware installed, any ongoing problems with it (using the incident tracking features); you can even leave comments. One of the big pushes we’ve been making is for a real Web 2.0 interface: we use a lot of AJAX and slick interface effects to keep the interface as intuitive and simple as possible.

Be sure to check out RSP 2.2 – we’re very proud of it, and hope you find it useful.

Unfortunately spam has become one of the most pervasive problems in the Internet age. It seems that as spam filters improve, spam evolves along with it in order to avoid the latest blacklists and checks. Like many people spam had become a real problem for me, and I tried a number of different filters with no avail. Many of the “top” filters suffered from either letting too much spam through, or worse yet classifying real mail (”ham”) as spam where it can often get missed. However recently I’ve begun using a spam filter called Bogofilter which I’ve found to be a big step above the other filters out there.

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Recently, I’ve been working on some Javascript effects using the great Scriptaculous code, and needed to create a “panel-resize” widget, where dragging an icon between two panels would result in both panels’ sizes changing relative to each other (in other words, dragging to the right would widen the left panel while shrinking the right, etc). I hadn’t seen this in use anywhere, so I decided to create a mockup and explain how I created it.

Of course, it’s by no means perfect, so be sure to let me know what you think. But I think it’s a workable example that seems to work fine in Firefox, Safari and IE (haven’t tested Opera, Konqueror, or several others yet).
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PHP is probably still the leader when it comes to server-side scripting and programming, although recently Ruby on Rails has started to give it a run for its money. Ruby on Rails provides a fast, easy way to get a web application written, and it benefits from using an MVC aritecture. Well now there’s a toolkit in development called the Zend Framework that aims to bring these advantages to PHP. IBM developerWorks has a good article giving an introduction to the Zend Framework.

The article describes two problems with Ruby on Rails that Zend can fix. First, most web developers know PHP, but many don’t know Ruby, so using Ruby on Rails would require learning a new programming language. Second, a lot of hosting providers still don’t allow for Ruby on Rails, so using it would require changing providers. Another benefit I can see is that many companies insist on PHP being used for certain applications, and might dismiss the idea of Ruby on Rails outright if they haven’t heard of it.

This isn’t to say that Zend would only be used as a second-rate version of Ruby on Rails. PHP is a good language in its own right, and for some applications its be a better choice than Ruby. However it’s worth noting that Ruby on Rails is more than just a framework. It also provides code generation an debugging tools that can make development a lot easier.  But the next time you need to create a web application using PHP, you should definitely consider using Zend.

Thought this was pretty cool (and a long time coming): the Linux NTFS kernel driver has now added write capabilities.  If you’ve ever used this – as many people have – than you’ve no doubt noticed how frustrating it can be when you can look at your files, but not touch them!  Check out this post at nixCraft with all the dirt.

The goals of the Linux-NTFS project are to develop reliable and full feature access to NTFS by the Linux kernel driver, and by a user space filesystem (ntfsmount), and to provide a wide collection of NTFS utilities (ntfsprogs) and a developer’s library (libntfs) for other GPLed programs. We have achieved already a lot, with high quality results.

I’ve been a big fan of using Linux-based rescue disks for repairing just about any computer, including Windows.  Having the capability to now edit an NTFS file system to help repair the system is great news.

Designing a website doesn’t have to be quite as hard as it used to. There are a number of freely available resources for people building sites. There’s a new IBM developerWorks article that gives links to a bunch of good ones. From the article:

Web developers can find many free resources, although some are freer than others. If you design a Web site or Web application, whether static or with all the dynamic Ajax goodness you can conjure up, you might find resources to lighten your load and spice up your content. From free icons to Web layouts and templates to on-line Web page tools, this article demonstrates that a Web architect can also get help these days at little or no cost.

We’ve discussed CSS galleries before, but there are some other nice resources the article mentions, including Creative Commons content, Open graphics, design tools, and even complete web templates. In particular I’ve found the Color Scheme Generator to be very useful, since I have enough trouble getting my clothes to match, let alone a whole web page.

YouOS is a startup with a really neat idea - creating an entire operating system through the web browser. It sounds like a crazy idea, but with recent developments in AJAX and server-side technology, the web browser is being used for a lot more than just the web. Applications like IM clients and word processors, that were once thought of solely as desktop applications, now have fully functional web verions.

YouOS isn’t an operating system in the strict sense of the word (you can’t boot off of it), but it does have a number of features that you would expect from an OS, like a shell, a browser, and a file explorer. There’s a recent blog post on their site that gives a good intro to the project. Also be sure to check out their live demo.

I think we’ll continue to see more and applications that exist only on the web. The real boon for web apps isn’t so much the ability to run everything through one program (although that’s nice) as it is being able to work from any computer that has a browser. With YouOS, that means potentially from any Internet cafe or public library you could access every file or application that would normally exist just on one computer.