Areca: Linux desktop backups made easy

There are some desktop backup tools available for Linux, but most of them are not developed anymore. Areca however is under constant development and also provides a user friendly GUI.

Backups and Linux are a twofold thing: if you have hundreds or thousands of computers backups are not a problem at all: Amanda, Bacula, Restore and others are your friends. Also, if you want to create backups on single machines, there are many tools available: rsync, tar, and many, many more.
However, all these solutions are not suitable for the average user.

In the last years several projects were started to provide user friendly solutions for the backup of Linux desktop machines. A year ago I already reported about SBackup. Also, the Ubuntu team developed the solution TimeVault and last but not least there is flyback which I used for several months to keep a backup of my thesis. But despite their advantages they all suffer from stalled development: all mentioned projects are effectively dead at the moment.

There is only one exception: the little known Areca. This in Java programmed backup solution provides a user friendly GUI and is even suited for desktop users who have a quite complex idea of backup systems.

Despite some current bugs (it chokes on large numbers of files, you have to use several backup rules in such cases) and some shortcomings (the file choose dialog only allows to mark one single file each time) the program has matured over the time and can easily be used in a productive environment. Besides the usual backup/restore it also features statistics, the ability of merging backups, different backup profiles, encryption and other gimmicks. But be sure to quickly read through the documentation so that you understand what backup groups and backup targets are before you start!

The only problem I now have is that it is not packed for Fedora - or any other bigger distribution besides Ubuntu. The download section provides pre-compiled tar.gz packages, however I would prefer a rpm I could automatically fetch with yum.

VirtualBox 1.6: new features

VirtualBox has released the newest version of its virtual machine software. Among the features is seamless window support for Linux guests and MacOS and Solaris host support.

The new version is the first majoer release of VirtualBox since the company behind, Innotek, was acquired by SUN. And this release comes along with a set of new features:

• Solaris and Mac OS X host support
• Seamless windowing for Linux and Solaris guests
• Guest Additions for Solaris
• A webservice API
• SATA hard disk (AHCI) controller
• Experimental Physical Address Extension (PAE) support
• GUI: added accessibility support (50
• VMM: many fixes for VT-x/SVM hardware-supported virtualization
• Linux installer: support DKMS for compiling the kernel module
• Linux additions: several fixes, experimental support for RandR 1.2
• Linux host: compatibility fixes with Linux 2.6.25

The changelog lists numerous additional changes. Among them are notes that the general system has been improved speed and power wise. This is reflected by a new file format: after the update VirtualBox asks to update the file system from linux-1.2 to linux-1.3.
Additionally the download section now has precompiled binaries for more distribution versions. There are even rpms available for the fugure Fedora 9.

The new release is again an evolutionary improvement which again introduces a set of new supported machines. The new ownvership of SUN can only be seen by numerous improvements in the Solaris support. Otherwise, the development of VirtualBox seems to be just like usual: evolving, stable but always with a set of new features.

UVC support soon in vanilla kernel?

In a recent interview with the German IT online magazine Golem.de the kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman mentioned that the USB video device support will soon be merged into the vanilla kernel.

Many USB video devices (like Webcams, etc.) do work via the UVC standard. There is of course a Linux driver available, however this is not part of the vanilla kernel yet due to problems with the Video4Linux implementation. Therefore it has to be compiled manually or is added afterwards as a patch by the distributions. Fedora 9 and the new Ubuntu 8.04 for example do include the driver with their kernels.

Now in an interview with the German Golem.de Greg Kroah-Hartman mentioned that it is planned to merge that device driver in the near future into the mainline kernel:

There is a standard for USB video devices and the corresponding driver will soon be merged into the kernel.

If this really happens than video devices on Linux will make a big step forward: first of all a huge set of devices will be supported out of the box. Second, the support can be expected - therefore application developers can rely on it and can develop applications incorporating such video devices. Third, the developers behind the driver finally get credit for their great work and can continue the development on a stable base and with a clear future. And last but not least, the distributions have one patch less to worry.

Besides this information GKH identifies two big problematic fields in the current Linux device driver world: WLAN and video devices. WLAN just became much more sane and easy due to the new stack, but Broadcom devices are still a problem due to lacking support from Broadcam. And while video graphic cards support is getting better due to published specifications (NVIDIA, you are the only one missing!) many devices like video cameras and similar are still a problem and not well supported yet.

It is good to see that the kernel device developers have a clear picture of which device drivers are missing. And btw., it is nice to see that these drivers are for average desktop devices for normal users. So in this regard the kernel developers have an eye on the desktop.

Using Dell’s D/Dock docking station with Linux

Dell is shipping docking stations for it’s Latitude Laptops. I’ve tested a D/Dock and it does work with Linux. The only real problems have their roots in Linux’ shortcomings.

My new laptop has docking station support, and since these docking stations can be bought second hand at very reasonable prices I got myself a D/Dock.

It worked out of the box: the laptop, plugged to the docking station, just works. External devices connected via USB or the external monitor also work as they would be plugged directly to the laptop. I didn’t test the media bay, the DVI connector or the additional PCI slot, so I’m not sure if they would work. However, since there were no other problems I would at least be confident in trying these.

Hotplugging is also not an issue: the laptop can be plugged on or off the docking station while it is running. Of course, mounted USB devices connected to the docking stations should be unmounted before plugging off! But besides that there are no real problems.

The only real disadvantages of the docking station itself I was so far able to recognize are that it has too few USB ports and that it is a bit noisier than I would have expected.
There are just 3 USB slots at the back plus one at the side (which is a bit extended to work with Dell stuff, but still works as a normal USB slot), but I would have preferred to have at least 6. Mouse, keyboard, external hard disk, webcam, USB stick and a MP3 player are not uncommon devices these days.
The other problem is the noise of the docking station fan: while it is not really disturbing and far away from the fan of my former laptop it is at least noisier than the laptop’s fan. But since the docking station was quite cheap I might open it to check if I can do anything about it.

So basically everything works very well - however, there is one problem due to the shortcoming of Linux - or X to be more specific - itself: the external monitor is not detected and activated automatically. And the other way around, if the external monitor is activated alone and the laptop is unplugged, the laptop screen stays blank and there is no way to bring it back.
So the actual shortcoming is that, while the basic hotplugging support is available, there is too little automation there: X should make clear that at least one connected output device is active all the time! Also, there should be easy ways to define specific situations: if monitor xyz is connected, switch to xyz only, if monitor abc is connected, switch to abc and laptop monitor. The first one would be the external monitor of the docking station, the second one could be a projector.

But again, this is a problem due to Linux, not due to the docking station. I guess this will have to wait until the proprietary drivers deliver XRandR 1.2 support and until the distributions ship XRandR 1.2 GUIs at a larger scale and really implement these into the system. Fedora 9 will ship with a Gnome interface, and afaik KDE 4 has basic XRandR 1.2 support anyway. Still, I’m not aware of any demon like capabilities to enable automatic device selection as mentioned above…

Fixing strange hard disk noises with power management

My recently acquired Laptop made some strange noises several times a minute. With some help I was able to identify the hard disk power management as the source of the problem. This was easy to fix with some power management system scripts.

My recently bought new Laptophad had one problem: a strange noise bugged me. It came up several times a minute, even in idle mode. With some very helpful comments of some friendly readers (thanks Chris, Rui and Michael!) I was able to identify the hard disk as the main problem: the Load Cycle Count went up much too often per minute.

# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count
/dev/sda: ST9160821AS: 37°C
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       2330
# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count
/dev/sda: ST9160821AS: 37°C
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       2333
[...]

I went through the comments and through several bug reports and howtos to determine the best way to fix the issue: the fix should be easy, should work with suspend/resume and should be as native as possible, so should use the tools which are thought to be used for such cases.

The (for me) optimal solution was explained in the OpenSuse Wiki in the article “Disk Power Management”: a script is dropped at /etc/pm/config.d/disk which defines the parameters for the disk disk for the powersave mode and the normal mode. The explanation is easy to understand and does not use distribution-specific tools, so it should work on every distribution out there - it dead certainly work here at my Fedora machine.

The only question left now is if I should report my specific hard disk model anywhere to make sure that this problem is fixed automatically in the future.