Web of Success: 15 Years of KidPub.com

About an hour and a half ago my wife and I sat on our back porch and watched a spectacular overhead pass by the International Space Station (ISS), chased by the Space Shuttle Discovery. This is Discovery’s last flight, the end of NASA’s shuttle program, and it was the last opportunity for us and all of humanity to see those two bright stars chase each other across the sky.

The night was perfect: Chilly and windy but ’severe clear’. The kind of night where you can count all of the Pleiades and a few extras for good measure. A thin crescent moon was just setting, and the pair of spacecraft lit up on the northwest horizon right on time: 6:58pm EST. This was a nearly overhead pass, 83 degrees, and the two were as bright as I had ever seen them, as if they knew that this was their finale. Just as they passed overhead at their zenith a third satellite crossed their path perpendicularly, icing n the cake.

I remember watching the very first shuttle launch, unable to leave the television set for hours. And now I’ve seen the last pass. It’s been a good run. A lot of incredible science has been accomplished, but there was always time for the astronauts to just sit back ad enjoy the ride.

Godspeed, Discovery. I’m sorry the ride is over.

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Why did it take me so long to drink the Mac Kool Aid? KidPub Press has recently started to produce ebooks for Kindle and Nook, and I wanted to also offer them on iBooks. Well, guess what? The only road to iBook publishing is through an iTunes plugin, and it has to be running on Mac OS/X.

Fine. We had a Lenovo T60p sitting unused in a corner, and it turns out the building an OS/X system on the laptop is relatively painless. A day of reading and loading and -voila- we now have the equivalent of a MacBook Pro. I’m writing on it right now.

For some reason I never fully grasped that MacOS is basically UNIX and a windowing system. Now I’ve been a Linux fan since 1994 and have had countless Linux boxes. There are two or three in the house right now, and the KidPub servers all run Red Hat Linux. It took about a minute of playing with the new HackBook before I realized that I was right at home. i suppose at some level I knew that MacOS had roots in BeOS and NextStep, both UNIX variants, but to be honest the entry price of a retail Mac had been a barrier to my even powering a Mac up.

Now that Apple has moved away from the PowerPC and embraced the intel platform it’s much simpler to get OS/X running on a variety of PC-purposed hardware. The T60p is really quite a nice platform…fast, crisp graphics, lightweight…I think it runs better under Snow Leopard than it does Windows.

I’m pretty heavily invested in the Windows platform for business software but I keep reaching for the T60p HackBook Pro. I have a lighter laptop for traveling but I have the feeling that this is the machine that I’l be using for research, browsing, email, and the like. And when it comes time for a technology upgrade at KidPub Press…

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A quick thank you to the folks at SOS backup for not hassling me when I asked for a refund.

You might have noticed a trend in my posts…I seem to be obsessed with backup software. The latest saga started with the purchase of a pair of Buffalo Linkstation NAS boxes. I love these things…they run Linux, have click-and-configure RAID 1 mirroring, and are fast enough that I can use them for my daily work instead of a local drive. The configuration in each is a pair of 500G drives in a RAID 1 array. To feed my backup paranoia there’s a job that runs nightly to back up each box to the other.

What I REALLY wanted, though, was cloud backup of the Linkstations. Guess what? Nobody is doing that right now. It might LOOK as though folks like Norton and SOS are doing it, but when the bits hit the wire it just isn’t happening. SOS Backup said thy could, and I believed them enough to pony up $80 for a license. After a week of trying everything in my bag of tricks, I just couldn’t get the software to work. Best I can tell there are issues with NAS drives and Windows 7 64-bit.

To their credit, tere was no hesitation in issuing a refund. I explained the problem, asked for a refund, and the next day it had been processed. Thank you!

Their exit interview / poll asked why i was leaving. I explained, as I’ve done to other companies, that there must be not even a glimmer of doubt in backup software. It needs to work the first time, the second time…every time, the same way, with no errors or tricks to get it working. Bottom line is that I just didn’t trust the software.

The cloud backup company I trust the most these days is Mozy, but even they aren’t offering backups for NAS drives.

So, what’s the solution? Fortunately it’s trivial to ‘jailbreak’ the Buffalo Linkstation to get a root shell, and I’ve simply set up a nightly cron job that uses rsync to backup my work files to a remote Linux server. Knock wood, with two sets of mirrored files and a remote backup I can sleep at night. At some point Mozy will offer NAS backups, and all will be well again.

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Last year around this time I was searching for a robust backup solution for KidPub Press. You might recall that I’d narrowed my evaluation down to Acronis True Image Home 2010, which I purchased and installed, then uninstalled after it failed to meet even basic backup requirements.

Fast-forward a year. I’ve just set up a RAID array for backups here in the office and am revisiting the backup strategy. Despite the earlier problems with Acronis 2010, I read through the data sheet for True Image Home 2011 and it sounded like they had produced a solid product this time around.

Wrong!

I bought the upgrade and installed. The installation had a few glitches, which should have been a red flag…there should be absolutely no surprises when installing software that is designed to give you peace of mind. The initial file-based backup went well and took less time than I thought it would, and subsequent incremental backups appeared to run just fine, too.

Not so much for email. I set up a scheduled email backup for every two hours. The first one failed. The second one failed. The third one failed. I did a quick search on the Acronis site for the issue. Guess what? They know about the problem…basically, you can’t backup your email files when Outlook is running.  The solution? Close Outlook before running the scheduled backup job.

Excuse me? I though you just said that I should stop what I’m doing every two hours, close Outlook, and wait for Acronis to back up the PST files.

What a sorry piece of junk. But it gets better…a search on the Acronis knowledge base shows that Acronis True Image Home 2010, last year’s version, had the same problem.

How can a software team, producing a product that should be rock-solid, introduce the same critical bug two versions in a row and not catch it in testing before releasing the product? It’s just mind-bogglingly pathetic.

So, that’s all for Acronis. I’ve uninstalled the thing and will never think about them again.

I wonder what Acronis employees use to back up their machines? Mozy?

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I was out in several of our nation’s major airports again this past week, and was once again struck by just how pathetic TSA’s so-called security procedures are. I really think that it’s time for Americans to acknowledge the massive failure that is the TSA and demand that we stop wasting taxpayer dollars on such an ineffective bureaucracy. Bruce Schneier is spot-on: The TSA and its procedures are strictly security theater, put in place to lull the traveling public into believing that their security is being somehow improved.

Consider that long line you stood in at the TSA checkpoint, waiting to show a TSA agent your photo ID and boarding pass. It seems very official, with badges and magnifying glasses and ultraviolet lights. We can take comfort that any of the million-plus individuals on the governments No Fly list would be stopped dead in their tracks by such scrutiny.

In reality, it is trivial to board a plane if you are on the No Fly list. Think about it. The agent at the checkpoint is relying on an ID and a document that you yourself hand to them. Also, what is being checked? Is your name being entered into a terminal to see if it matches a name on the list of know or suspected terrorists? Is there a paper copy? Has the agent memorized the million names on the list?

No, what’s being so diligently checked is whether the name on the ID matches the name on a piece of paper that you have produced. Same number of letters? Spelled the same, or at least close? You’re good to go. That TSA agent, front line defender of our flying safety, is little more than a uniformed elementary teacher checking spelling.

There’s nothing complicated about boarding a plane if you are on the No Fly list. Simply pick up a prepaid debit card at your local convenience store (while you are there you might as well pay cash for a prepaid cell phone in case you need to make an untraceable phone call). Go home, open up a browser, and purchase a ticket using your debit card. Use a name that you know isn’t on the list. When the day comes to fly, check in online and print the boarding pass with the false name on it. While you’re there, save the page…it’s a PDF file. Open the PDF file with Acrobat and edit the name on the boarding pass to match the one on your real ID. Print the second pass and head for the airport.

At the airport, hand your real ID and the matching boarding pass to the TSA agent. As long as you didn’t typo your own name, you’ll walk right through.

At the gate, hand the gate agent the boarding pass with the false name on it. They check the name against ticketed passengers. It matches, so you are free to get on the plane.

Incidentally, if you aren’t flying but just want to meet someone at the gate, or maybe shop at the duty free store, you can print your own boarding pass for any flight that you wish and just walk through the TSA security with it using the same technique.

This ridiculous system is costing taxpayers billions of dollars every year. Although it has its critics, the system in place in Israel seems to be much more effective and much less intrusive. It’s real security, not security theater. Tell your congressional representative that you are tired of wasting money and ask for a thorough review of the TSA and its ineffective policies and procedures. If you don’t know who your representatives are, visit congress.org to find out.

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Ever think about how much you trust your software? For most of the things we do on a PC, there’s really very little trust involved. We expect Word to display text as we type it, or our calculator to return accurate numbers, but for the most part we accept the little idiosyncrasies and shortcomings of our applications and work around them, if we even notice them.

When it comes to backup software, though, the story is a little different. There’s no room for mistakes. In an earlier post I wrote about selecting a backup solution for our Linux servers, and part of that process included whether or not I got a good feeling when running the application. Any little glitch, unexpected response, or slow refresh meant that I’d cross that package off of the list.

I did the same thing when choosing a Windows backup solution for my daily work desktop.  Ghost was ok, but a bit slow, and I’d read that there were issues running it under then-beta Windows 7. I did some research and found that Acronis had a popular solution in their True Image Home product. It includes an innovative ‘continuous’ backup feature that does an incremental backup every five minutes which I found attractive. It retails for about $50, a bargain for some peace of mind.

Acronis worked reasonably well under Windows 7 RC. It was a bit of a resource hog and would slow the machine to a crawl on power-up as it rechecked every file on the system, but I got used to it. I ost and recovered a file or two over the month that I used it and was happy with the result.

Then came the installation of the production version of Windows 7. I’ll cut to the chase: Acronis completely failed. It wouldn’t run a backup, instead displaying a blank alert box: Ok? I don’t think so. Worse, I was not able to open ANY of the backed up files from the prior installation. Instead of simply refreshing directories on my base Windows 7 install, I had to dig up backup DVDs of those files and rebuild the machine manually.

Acronis’ answer to the high-severity bug ticket I filed? We know it’s a problem and we’ll get back to you. That was several weeks ago, and from the chatter on the Acronis user forum it’s clear that it wasn’t just me seeing this problem.

This kind of failure in a backup product is simply inexcusable. Fortunately I had backups of my Acronis backups, and I feel truly sorry for those who didn’t. Granted, rolling back to Windows 7 RC is a temporary fix, but Acronis has lost the single most important feature of their product: Trust. They have lost me as a customer for life, and probably anyone who asks me what I use for backup.

I replaced Acronis with Cobian, an open source solution that works extremely well. Unlike Acronis, which saves files in a proprietary format, Cobian stores files in standard format, so even if Cobian won’t start I can still get to my files. It does everything you’d expect it to, and does it efficiently. It offers features that Windows 7 backups doesn’t, and best of all it’s free.

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Just a few weeks after my post evaluating backup and recovery solutions for Linux, we had a hard failure on one of the machines that we use for daily editing work. It holds most of the master files for active books. It was one of those failures that ends up being cheaper to replace the machine rather than repair it.

On the plus side, it was an excuse to pick up one of the quad-core Intel machines that Gateway and others are deep-discounting right now. And it was a perfect lesson in the value of regular backups. Since we Ghost the machine daily (sometimes more often, using Ghost’s triggers), we were able to recover our data with just a few hours of lost work. It takes about ten minutes to set  up automated backup tasks in Ghost and other backup software, and then you just forget about it until you need it (and you WILL need it!).

On the minus side, I’m now starting to be obsessed with data protection…a rack of RAID is just what we need right now…

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About a month ago I started evaluating backup solutions for the web sites I host on my remote servers. I’ve had a little Netgear NSLU2 (Slug) doing the job…the Slug is a tiny Linux server…it’s about the size of a deck of cards…that come with two USB ports and an ethernet connection. Although the NSLU2 is preinstalled with a Linux distribution, I reflashed it with Debian. The little Slug has been doing nightly backups via rsync for three or four years now, storing them on an external drive. Once a week I burn a snapshot to DVD.

Why replace something that works? I’m beginning to worry that the NsLU2 might give up the ghost. I suppose it’s just paranoia, after all the thing has an uptime of 342 days today, and seems to be working fine. I think it was the launch of the new KidPub Press bookstore that made me rethink the backup strategy.

The difficulty I had finding a solution is that the servers are running a Red Hat variant of Linux (CentOS), and I wanted to to backups to a local Windows 7 box, mainly for ease of use. Even though the Slug does a great job, it’s incredibly slow…it takes a couple of hours to build a1G ISO image for burning to DVD, for example. My requirements were pretty simple. I need to do a one-way daily mirror of several directories and the MySQL databases.

I evaluated seven solutions:

• SiteShelter
• HandyBackup
• Backup4All
• Site Vault
• Unison
• DeltaCopy
• cwRsync

The first four are commercial products ranging in price from $200 to $40. The last three are open source.

Of the commercial solutions, only SiteShelter was able to properly mirror the remote server. The issue is that most of the backup programs rely on an Attribute flag on a file to determine if a file has been archived, however the flag doesn’t exist in the Linux filesystem. The symptom of this is that an incremental backup will download everything, even ify ou’ve just done one, because the software doesn’t have any way to tell if it has already downloaded a file.

SiteShelter is able to correctly manage incremental backups from the Linux box. Its interface leaves a lot to be desired, though. In its defense, the program is supposed to be run as a service, but I don’t think that’s an excuse for having an awkward human UI. Of the three commercial solutions it is the most expensive, at $200 for a single license. Although I thought SiteShelter was promising, I really didn’t see any advantage in using it versus using rsync, which is free.

The trouble, of course, is that there is no native rsync for Windows. I started looking for rsync ports. Most of them rely on Cygwin, and excellent Unix emulator for Windows that’s been around for as long as I can remember. Installing Cygwin just to get rsync seemed like overkill, ven for a Linux guy like me. Instead, I found three packages hat bundle just enough Cygwin with rsync to provide a backup solution for Windows.

Unison is the most complicated, and I rejected it for its complexity. It just does way more than I need, and just configuring it for a quick test took an hour.

DeltaCopy works but suffers from a very poor user interface. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in it because of this.

I settled on cwRsync. Although it has a UI based on GTK, I didn’t use it. It is identical to rsync on the Linux side, so I simply copied over my rsync script from the NSLU2. I had to change the destination directory, but that was the only configuration required, and the exclusion file I’ve added to over the years didn’t need to be changed at all. Ten minutes setting up the batch file to run in Windows Scheduler and I was done with my backup solution. It’s fast, secure (uses SSH), and just works, which is my #1 criteria for any product.

One other bit of information…a few of the commercial products try to back up MySQL databases by logging on to them directly. I didn’t get a lot of good feelings about these, and they seemed terribly slow. Because I ended up using rsync, I stuck with my old database backup strategy, which is a cron job that runs on the server that uses mysqldump to create snapshots of all of the critical databases. These files are dropped into a directory that rsync monitors for its daily run.

I now have a solid backup system to a Windows machine that is fast, easy to use (the remote directory structure is duplicated locally), and provides a quick burn to DVD. That it is free and a familiar and trusted solution is icing.

perryd optimization, tools, web sites backup, linux, rsync

I recently spent about a week evaluating shopping-cart platforms for the new KidPub Press online bookstore. My requirements were actually fairly simple; I wanted something that:

• Is easy to administer
• Can be made to look like a bookstore
• Has PHP as the underlying code
• Integrates with Linkpoint as a payment gateway

The three prime contenders were Drupal (already in use at kidpub.com), Magento, and Zen-Cart.

I ruled out Drupal pretty quickly. even though I’ve used it for several years for the main KidPub site, I see it as a CMS platform, and what I really wanted was an e-commerce platform. Drupal can certainly be made to look and act like a bookstore, and it does have a Linkpoint module (though it is ‘beta’ code), but at the end of the day Drupal is about managing content, not transactions.

Next up was Magento. I’d read rabid reviews of the thing written by people who are just in love with the platform. I tried for about a day and a half to get Magento running correctly on my staging server without much luck. Wrong PHP version. Wrong SSL library. Database problems. I’m no slouch, having been knee-deep in Linux and Unix for about twenty years now, and I couldn’t get Magento to run in a way that gave me any sort of confidence. Letting it manage credit card transactions was out of the question, and it turns out that Magento and Linkpoint don’t play well together. Authorize.net? Out-of-the-box. Linkpoint? Good luck.

Zen-Cart was actually my second choice. Magento LOOKS fabulous, and I wanted that look for the store. Zen-Cart looks, well, a bit homemade, and there’s an expectation that you will roll up your sleeves and dig into the code if you want anything other than default behavior. To be fair, I’ve seen some outstanding sites powered by Zen-Cart, but I honestly don’t have the talent at hand to do such design work.

What sold me on Zen-Cart was that after literally two days of wrestling with Magento (and not getting ANYTHING to work), it took about ten minutes to get Zen-Cart up and running. Another few hours of tweaking and adding product, and I had a complete e-commerce site with full payment gateway integration AND that looks and acts like a bookstore. There’s a ‘book’ product module available, and I paid for a template look-and-feel that I thought was nice.

I’m pretty comfortable tweaking the PHP code in Zen-Cart, and I’ve done a moderate amount of customization. My impression of the Zen-Cart community is that there isn’t a lot of deep coding expertise, at least among the majority of users. There’s a lot of ‘find this line and change this value’ advice in the forums. That’s fine, Zen-Cart is a simple system and if I need to tweak a table or edit PHP to change some text, I don’t mind.

If what you need is just shopping-cart functionality without a lot of bells-and-whistles, consider Zen-Cart. Magento, in my opinion, just isn’t ready for commercial deployment. And Drupal? It’s still a pretty good CMS system.

You can see our Zen-Cart implementation at the KidPub Press bookstore.

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Those of you who know me even moderately well will be stunned to hear me say this: Windows 7 marks the end of the line for Linux on the desktop.

I’m a huge proponent of open source, and of Linux in particular, and I’ve actively used Linux since around 1994. Two of my current computers are running Ubuntu, and I use CentOS on the site’s web servers. In my former role as an analyst at a large market research firm in Boston, I wrote that Linux had boxed itself into a corner on the desktop by trying to be too much like Windows. Linux UI developers, particularly the Gnome and KDE teams, succeeded in their goal of making Windows users comfortable enough with Linux to switch by making their UIs so close to Windows’ as to be indistinguishable.

At that moment, any differentiation between Linux and Windows was lost. Desktop hardware has become robust enough that we don’t need an OS and GUI that runs ‘faster’ on limited specs. User applications like email and the browser are nearly identical. And, for corporation, why retool IT to deploy a desktop that looks and feels (and, for the most part, performs) just like Windows? Why not stick with Windows?

A few years back, though, Microsoft accidentally left the door unlocked and the car running when they shipped Vista. IT departments avoided it like the plague, but at the same time needed to update their installations. Distributions like Ubuntu came exceptionally close to making serious inroads on the corporate desktop, solely due to the enormous void left by Vista. That window of opportunity lasted a couple of years, and Linux could have pushed through the final barrier of resistance to deliver on its promise of an inexpensive, solid desktop solution.

It didn’t make it. Windows 7, now out as a release candidate, is so much better than Vista and XP that IT departments are going to breathe a collective sigh of relief and haul out their checkbooks. Win 7 is peppy, just like Ubuntu / Gnome, it’s pretty, and nearly all of the little things that drove frustrated Windows users to Linux have been fixed. There’s even less of a difference now between Linux and Windows on the desktop, except for the still large number of Windows applications that have no usable Linux counterpart.

Ah, but what about netbooks? Surely that’s the perfect place for Linux!

I disagree. I own a Linux netbook (the Acer One), and I love it, but only because I wiped the nearly useless, watered down software that it came with and installed Ubuntu (with a custom kernel that I compiled myself for speed and efficiency). The Linux experience on netbooks just isn’t that great. Once Win 7 is customized for the netbook market, there will be no compelling reason to install Linux on one.

Lest you think I’ve completely abandoned Linux, it isn’t true. I’m an open-source proponent, just not a zealot. Linux in the server room still makes a lot of sense, and there will always be those companies who embrace open-source technologies as a matter of principle. As an analyst it was quite clear that there weren’t significant financial incentives to choose Linux over anything else in the data center, and there will always be a split between the Unix camp and the Windows camp. Linux just makes sense on a server.

On the desktop, though…I’m a Win 7 convert!

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