As you may know (and if you don’t, you may want to read this), I’m using Gentoo on my main workstation, and Ubuntu on my laptop. But I always felt that the default Ubuntu was too heavy: it takes so long to boot, a lot of unnecessary processes are started, the gnome environment is too slow, …

So once again, I decided to install Debian… I like distributions that allows you to decide from the beginning on what you are going to install or not (the main reason why I stick to Gentoo when enough compilation power is available). But once again, I was really disappointed by Debian: you only get very old stuff with the default repositories, and starting to add custom reps is an open door to configuration problems.

So I looked for alternatives, and I decided to try the server version of Ubuntu… The installation went smooth, but the first boot didn’t… I just received some “unknown interrupt or fault”, and it seemed I wasn’t the only one.

My last attempt at installing Ubuntu was using the 6-10 alternate image…. And that is what I should have done since the beginning!!!! You can choose to install a Command Line Only system, and then build your customized system upon it! It is just the right choice between Debian and the default Ubuntu: the freedom of choice that Debian offers, with the latest packages built for Ubuntu.

My laptop now boots in less than 30sec, is fast as hell, and is provided with the latest packages (firefox 2, kernel 2.6.17-10, …).

You should really give it a try!

Last thursday, our server suffered from a catastrophic hard drives failure. We were using software RAID on two SATA disks, but because of our stupid datacenter’s team (DigitalRoot not to name it…) shutting down the server by removing the power plug to move it to another location, the RAID setup became unstable. However, we continued to use it…

BAD IDEA!!!! After some weeks, it totally broke up. We lost everything… :grr: Good occasion to test our backup system. After a rapid re-install (from scratch), we recovered all backed-up data from the backup server, and we were up and running some hours later… :stress:

Lessons Learned:

• Perform an image of the base system – to do
• Perform backup of: /etc, /home, /databases – OK
• DO NOT USE software raid – OK (sata raid controller installed)
• Backup: perform periodic “copy and delete” sync. By that, I mean not only copy all modified files to the backup server, but also remove them from it when they are removed on the production server. Indeed, after the data recovery, I had a lot of unread e-mails… When I read and deleted them, some of them were in fact already backed up. :dead: