Esposito Technical Services - Blog

New Isn’t Always Worth It

admin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:57:40 +0000

Let’s face it, for most of us computers have been fast enough for the past several years. If you have an old computer that you are still trying to use, a “surplus” machine with the addition of Open Source Software can make a fine replacement.

For example, here’s a $109 PC with a Windows XP license. Add OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and a few other free apps and you have a solid day to day PC. Could it use a bit more RAM? Sure. Is the hard drive a bit small for a large movie or music library? Certainly. Will it check email, edit photos, blog, and web surf fine? Most Certainly. And for most of us, that’s good enough!

Why I don’t Pay for Backup Software

admin — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:55:14 +0000

Here’s my secret: I don’t pay for Backup Software. With fast Internet connections, cheap disks, and Open Source Software, I just don’t see the need.

I’ve been running the web hosting side of this business for 2 years now. This business started as a hobby. Some friends were starting up companies, and needed help. I justified the expense by running IRC on the machine and chatting with friends. Even with this hobby, I focused on data redundancy and backups.

I had heard of and followed Leafy Host, and didn’t want to go down that road, ever. Enter Rsync and OpenSSH.

Every day I run a simple script that copies new files from the web server to the backup server. The backup server itself contains redundant disks, but that’s another story.
rsync -av --progress \ --compress --delete --archive \ --backup --backup-dir=`date +%Y%m%d` \ /data username@hostname.com:/data/consulting/webserverbackup/
There it is. My script is a bit more complex, as it iterates over multiple directories, but this is the one that matters. Not only does this transfer the files every day, but it saves a snapshot of the files removed since the day before in a directory with the date as a name.

It works, it’s resiliant, and it’s free. This technique works great with Linux, Solaris, or even Windows with the Cygwin Environment installed.

www.j-espo.com goes live

admin — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:15:11 +0000

I’m well on my way towards getting my new website up and running. Several evenings spent in front of the laptop have brought about the site and blog, skinned to look the same.

My site is an example of how I like to work. By leveraging Creative Commons licensed templates (this one had a requested $15 donation to remove the link back to the designer), I’m able to get the site protyped quickly. I left the links in the css code, but didn’t want to link directly in the html in case the site turned NSFW or something. Here’s the link, though if anyone’s interested:

The photography is stock. Since we’re just looking for web graphcis, the smallest $1 graphics are fine. They are actually too big.

The hardest part of this project was modifying enough of the WordPress theme to match the theme of the site itself. Besides that the site was chopped up, wrapped in PHP code to templatize it, and had some variables added to make it a bit smarter.

Still didn’t happen instantly, but we’re off and running in about 4-5 hours. Not bad for $18 worth of expense.