Took the Taco to Sheep Bridge…
My brother and I took a 100+ mile dirt trek out to Sheep Bridge and back. We took Cave Creek Road up to Bloody Basin Road, then East to Sheep Bridge. After lunch, we back tracked to the Cave Creek & Blood Basin intersection and headed West towards the Agua Fria National Monument and on through to I-17. Then we headed 60 miles down I-17 back to Phoenix.
Took an easy run up GWT today…
Today was a wonderful day to head out to the Great Western Trail. We cruised up Pima road to Cave Creek road and to Tonto Hills. There we posed for some pictures with the “World’s Tallest Kachina Statue”. From there we headed up to the old washed out 7 Springs Campground. Not a really long ride, but enough to get out and have some fun.
Las Vegas…
So last week, I had to be in Vegas for a the NAHB International Builders’ Show. What better way to get there than ride? I also wanted to take as many two lane highways as possible. All in all, I covered 600+ miles there and back along some great Arizona and Nevada scenery, including Route 66!
Finally done…
So I finally finished college this past week. O M G, it feels so good to be done. College grad @ age 36! Better late than never.
Using forfiles.exe to delete old files…
So I setup a PC DVR unit to handle some security cameras for a client of mine. As a result, the *.avi files would start to eat up a lot of space after a month or so of recording. So I elected to use the forfiles.exe program to take care of the problem. Note this is a windows platform and if you are using anything pre-W2k3 (like XP), you’ll need to download the program from MS (link is for x86!).
For simplicity, I just saved it in c:\windows. Next you’ll need to figure out the proper syntax to use for your needs. Mine was to delete any .AVI file that was older than 7 days, located in a particular pathway, such as c:\dvr-video. Below is what I am using…
FORFILES -pc:\dvr-video-s -m*.avi -d-7 -c”CMD /c del /q @FILE”
I would suggest you test this prior to blasting away your files. The line below will echo all the files that would normally be deleted if you ran the command above.
FORFILES -pc:\dvr-video -s -m*.avi -d-7 -c”CMD /c ECHO @FILE”
I would also suggest you take a look at the FORFILES syntax flags. Here is a link to the CMD syntax flags too, if you are new to the command. Once you have it all worked out, save it in a notepad file with a .bat extension. Location doesn’t matter, just somewhere you can find it for the next step.
The final step is to fire up your Task Scheduler and configure it to run this batch file however often you need it to run. Since my batch file deletes files older than 7 days, I run it once a week on Saturday, at 4AM.
Overall, it is a pretty simple setup.
2 things to note…
1. If your files have spaces in them, this won’t work. The only workaround I know offhand is to use underscore or hyphens in your files names.
2. If there are spaces in your pathway, you’ll need to put it in quotes, like FORFILES -p”c:\my pathway\has spaces\to my\files”
Took the KTM on a 120+ mile desert ride…
I finally got to complete the full loop of The Great Western Trail to Bloody Basin to Sheep Bridge to Horseshoe Lake Dam. I fell off once and tipped over twice. If you are going to ride this loop, be careful of the two concrete water crossings in the 7 Springs Recreation area. They can be as slick as ice with all the damn algae buildup. I’ve crossed them half a dozen times with no problem, but I slipped on the second crossing and fell off in the middle of the concrete. Not hurt, but busted off a mirror 
The most challenging areas though, was the going down the rocky incline on the East side of Sheep Bridge and getting up the West side of the path down to the crossing under the dam. I tipped over on both those spots. Thankfully, I had a riding buddy there to help me get the bike up. It is a lot of work to do this loop in 100F weather. Other than a little heat exhaustion that set in once I got home (headache and throwing up), it was a decent ride.
Using ncftpget for automated FTP backups…
So I like to use Mikrotik routers for moving bits around my networks and the Internet. In an effort to ensure I always have an off-host backup available, I’ve setup a backup process using ncftpget. I won’t cover how to setup cron jobs, hopefully you already know how to set one up. That said, this is a pretty simple setup.
I have my backups process nightly, at midnight. Here is a sample command syntax for my 750G called Gatekeeper:
cd /home/mikrotik/Gatekeeper_RB750G && /usr/local/bin/ncftpget -f ../.netrc_gatekeeper ./ /*.backup
The first part of the command drops you into your storage directory. The second part tells ncftpget to use the server and login information contained within the file .netrc_gatekeeper and to download any files matching the *.backup wildcard. You can change this to suit your needs.
Here is an example of how your .netrc file should look like:
machine 'IP/hostname'
user your_ftp_username
pass your_ftp_password
Note: You’ll need to create a separate .netrc file for each host you want to backup. Hence, my naming scheme of .netrc_hostname.
Here is a second command syntax example for my 493AH called Keymaster:
cd /home/mikrotik/Keymaster_RB493AH && /usr/local/bin/ncftpget -f ../.netrc_keymaster ./ /*.backup
The US Navy is retarded…
My evidence…
Back in the day, they used to name ships after heroes who accomplished great things. Now they are naming them after victims.
That says everything you need to know about America under BHO.
Let’s just start with WWII…I can think of 400,000+ that are more worthy to have a ship named after them than a Congressional Rep.
BackupPC is magic…
Well, I’ve been using BackupPC for about half a year now. I’m pretty happy with it. For an open source application, it is pretty polished. At the several businesses where I’ve been asked to pitch a backup application for LAMP server farms, I’ve had great success with this software. I love open source. It is definitely a way to to knock out backups for your LAMP server with minimal cost. Providing a company or individual has the in-house talent to set it up (it ain’t rocket science!), your cost for a robust, enterprise capable backup application, is limited to your hardware costs.
Now, recently I ran into a problem with BackupPC, running on CentOS 5.7. After a yum update, when trying to process a backup job, BackupPC would error out with a Compress::Zlib error. After much google-fu, I came across this guy’s solution. Doing a force install on CPAN solved my problem. Hope this helps someone else.
GrubHub is awesome!
If you haven’t heard of grub hub, check it out the next time you get hungry.
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