Awoke to find that the name on my online bank account has been changed to Dr. Madeleine Smith, who coincidentally has the same first line of address. Spent the morning trying to sort that out...
After breakfast, I installed a 3-way phone splitter and extension cable running to a studio phone upstairs, listening to a *very cool* Scott Stroman CD I just got called Songs Of The Spirit. Reading the sleeve notes, I found that Madeleine Smith is also a singer in Clifton High Junior Chamber Choir! Then I heard Scott Stroman himself talking on Jazz File on Radio 3!
* [Not Myself Today was the title of Chapter 7 of The Chronicles of Wizard Prang by Stafford Beer.]
Yet more reading up on
rsync, trying
yet again to
ssh from one computer to another,
but I still couldn't get it to work :-/ (must
read more)
To calm my annoyance, I moved some studio gear around yet again, still searching for the ultimate setup, which I later found. I've spent the week totally obsessed with audio gear, even more so than ever, deciding that I 'need' (i.e., want/desire/lust after) a CLM DB8000S pre-amp and a FunkLogic Palindrometer. [UPDATE: The Gearlust won eventually of course, on both counts... ;-] The former had appeared on eBay, and I had the money to buy one, but did I really need it just yet? I'd also fallen in love with a new FMR baby and found a Really Nice Compressor going cheap. But I already have a few compressors...
A few days later, I went out for a walk, beside myself with my dilemma. Should I spend a grand and a half on something rare that I've desired for years which will be very useful (and collectable) in future years, but is not totally essential for me at the moment? Not far into the woods, I realised that my panicked state was completely self-induced, and that peace was available *for free* right here, out in nature. I will never be happy with my continual gear-craving. Besides, the current state of the world and the oil crisis brought on by the chaos in America suggests to me to save some of my hard-earned money for more crucial things. This realisation was a pivotal moment; I'm now perfectly happy with what I have. I just need a new computer now, maybe another mic or two... :-)
rsync'ed UpLater on, I finally came to understand that ssh was wanting me
to type in the *host* password, not the private key passphrase! This
doh! moment opened the door, and I was able to
rsync over
ssh :-)
At last I can make
proper backups! I set to it
immediately, beginning by copying
/etc/skel from
mirage to trancefer to setup my optimum
.bashrc file on all of
my machines. Next, after reading
man bzip and man tar I
backed up my complete
12GB /home directory, which
took a long time through my 10Mbps bottleneck hub (I
really should get a 100Mbps one, but I love my old retro
ethernet hub which I got free
and nicely matches
my cabinet. All this frantic
activity lit up
blinkenlights I never knew it had
:-) The
beauty of rsync
is that it only copies the changes, so after the initial archive is
created, updates are quick.
I
also copied /etc /var /boot /lib and /usr/local,
which ended up filling the remaining space on
trancefer's disks! So now I need to get a backplane for my
SCSI array for
rotating
Grandfather/Father/Son multiple generation
copies, maybe some
nifty
automated
scripting... But, oh the peace of mind now that two years' work is not
just perched precariously on one
IDE disk - I can
breathe out again.
[UPDATE: I later forgot what I'd learned about
ssh, and let my backup routine slip... with
disastrous consequences.
Having learned the hard way, I now have a fully
automated backup system.]
While this was all going on, I photographed my studio by night (pics soon), hearing a gorgeous Nick Drake compilation Way To Blue. After many hours of filing, I eventually slept at dawn, contented after a very productive day.
© copyright Malcolm Smith 2005-08-01 - last updated 2008-08-20
