The Modern Landscape

By Jerry Pournelle

October 10, 2005

(The Modern Landscape :  Page 1 of 1 )

Column 302 (Continued from the Previous Week)

A Mirra Report

Last month I had a lengthy section on Mirra, the Linux based backup server system, based on reports from a reliable reader who had installed it in his clinic. I now have the Mirra system in place here, and I can say it works very much as described.

Installation is simple with one problem: the instructions tell you to wait for an orange light. Either that's wrong, or the orange LED on my Mirra system is defective. This turns out to be unimportant, since the orange light is simply a signal that certain operations have been completed, and there are many alternative ways to determine that.

The beauty of the Mirra backup system is that once it is in place and running, you never need think of it. We have in fact tested its capability to restore some crucial data files, and it works exactly as advertised. Other than that, I often forget that the Mirra is here at all. It sits back in the cable room and sucks in data from four different networked machines, and It Just Works.

In particular, Mirra grabs the open outlook.pst file from Anastasia, my main communications work station. Of course that file is huge and changes all the time, so Mirra is often well behind; but since it is not overwriting its previous backup, there is always a more or less up to date backup file, and eventually there will be a quiet enough period that Mirra can catch up on my 2 GB outlook.pst file.

Deep in the cable room. The Mirra sits next to a D-Link Gaming Router we're about to install. The Belkin KVM unit the D-Link sits on has operated flawlessly for more than a year. Up above is the D-Link 24 Port Gigbit Ethernet Switch which replaced a whole bunch of other switches. The cable room is a bit of a mess, but it's air conditioned and we can find everything.  Page 1 of 1  BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2005

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