On The Fence Development

In my previous couple of posts I've been configuring Dropbox on my Virtual Private server running a headless installation of Ubuntu 10.04. The main reason for this was to enable me to use it for storing backups without having to rely in the Dropbox Web API which has proven to be somewhat flaky - or at least that's my experience. With the Dropbox daemon now installed, configured and running all I need now is a script to perform the actual backups and save in the appropriate location.

In Part 1 I clarified a few points on the Dropbox tutorial for getting the server running on a headless Linux server and while I had it running it was 'locked' to an ssh session, i.e. close the session and the Dropbox server also stopped. The same tutorial provides links to sample init.d files which can be used to start the Dropbox server on boot. This works well enough but there were a couple of things that, again, could have done with a bit more detail.

If you've been reading any of my recent posts you will know that I have been moving from a shared server host to a virtual private server and that I have also experienced issues with my backups. Well with the blog configured and running well the migration was almost complete, but what about backing up my data?

So my move from shared hosting to virtual private server (VPS) was going well so far - I'd moved this blog across and  wired up Exim4 to handling all my emailing needs.

In my previous post I explained that I was migrating this blog from a shared server provided by 5quidhosting onto a virtual private server (VPS) provided by BHost. In theory this should have been quite straightforward but in practice, and bearing in mind I'm a developer and not an infrastructure boffin, there was a lot more to is that just moving zip files around and running a few commands.

Like many tech-savy people these days I've been thinking about buying a Network Attached Storage device (NAS) for some time but being more into software than hardware I've never really understood enough about them to lay down my hard earned cash. Well recently my hand was forced by my external hard drive starting to act up and my girlfriends son filling his 70GB HDD with downloaded Flight Simulator extensions (and god knows what else!).

In my previous post I mentioned that one of the problems I faced when trying to install and debug my first Android application was that the Android Debug Bridge (adb) was not running as root. Now shutting the service down and restarting it with sudo was all that was required but that's a bit of a faff, there had to be a way to configure adb to be started with root privileges - and there is.

In a previous post I managed to get my Ubuntu Server test system connected to my home network and the Internet (at least from the inside looking out). If you read the post then you will know that because my house is almost 100% wireless I needed to move the system into the hallway to be next to the router in order to physically connect.

I recently bought an 'old' PC to use as a test system, running XP for my .NET development and Ubuntu Server (Jaunty 9.04) for my investigations into Linux. I have a few spare drives kicking around so having a totally separate installation of XP and Ubuntu would be a doddle.