We both have files held on our systems that we simply can’t afford to lose. We also work wirelessly. For those reasons Apple’s TimeMachine seemed like a really good option. However, at the £250GBP price tag and already having a home server, a bespoke solution appealed to both the geek and cost-saver in me.

After collating information from several different sources, please find below the steps required to setup and configure an Ubuntu instance to take backups from your Mac via TimeMachine:

Download netatalk 2.2 (The version held in Ubuntu repositories is 2.1 and Lion requires 2.2)

Natty i386: https://launchpad.net/~stefanor/+archive/ppa/+files/netatalk_2.2.0-0ppa2~natty1_i386.deb
Natty amd64: https://launchpad.net/~stefanor/+archive/ppa/+files/netatalk_2.2.0-0ppa2~natty1_amd64.deb
(Others here: https://launchpad.net/~stefanor/+archive/ppa/+packages)

Install netatalk
via dpkg -i <netatalk package name>

Edit /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf
The only line you want: “- -udp -noddp -uamlist uams_randnum.so,uams_dhx.so,uams_dhx2.so -nosavepassword”

Edit /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default
Remove the default line for ~/ (if it exists) by commenting it out (a # should do). Add a new line: “~/.TimeMachine “$u Backup” allow:jamesanslow cnidscheme:dbd options:usedots,upriv,tm” – REPLACING “jamesanslow” with YOUR server username.

Create your Timeachine directory
mkdir ~/.TimeMachine should do it fine

Edit /etc/netatalk/netatalk.conf
Add/append/uncomment/leave the same the following important lines to:
ATALK_NAME=`echo ${HOSTNAME}|cut -d. -f1`
ATALK_UNIX_CHARSET=’LOCALE’
ATALK_MAC_CHARSET=’MAC_ROMAN’
export ATALK_UNIX_CHARSET
export ATALK_MAC_CHARSET
CNID_METAD_RUN=yes
AFPD_RUN=yes
AFPD_MAX_CLIENTS=20
ATALKD_RUN=no
PAPD_RUN=no
TIMELORD_RUN=no
A2BOOT_RUN=no

Create a new file in /etc/avahi/services/afpd.service
Copying in the following:
<?xml version=”1.0″ standalone=’no’?><!–*-nxml-*–>
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM “avahi-service.dtd”>
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards=”yes”>%h</name>
<service>
<type>_afpovertcp._tcp</type>
<port>548</port>
</service>
<service>
<type>_device-info._tcp</type>
<port>0</port>
<txt-record>model=Xserve</txt-record>
</service>
</service-group>

Restart netatalk:
sudo /etc/init.d/netatalk restart

Connect to your server from your mac
Go to Finder and your server should appear in the left hand side. If not, CMD+K to manual connect.

Create your sparse backup file
Open up a terminal on your Mac. Move (cd) to the folder where your server’s mounted. This should be /Volumes/<username> Backup. So for me that would be “/Volumes/jamesanslow Backup”. Then run this command to create your backup file (replacing 512g with the size you’d like your TimeMachine to be in Gigabytes):

hdiutil create -size 512g -fs HFS+J -volname “Time Machine” `grep -A1 LocalHostName /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist | tail -n1 | awk ‘BEGIN { FS = “|” } ; { print $2 }’`_`ifconfig en0 | grep ether | awk ‘BEGIN { FS = “:” } ; {print $1$2$3$4$5$6}’ | awk {‘print $2′}`.sparsebundle

Configure OS X to show all types of media for use in TimeMachine
Set OS X to show all types of media, such as ours by running this command in the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Go for it. Open up TimeMachine, select your network TimeMachine instance and get backing up!

One of my recent purchases has been the Amstrad Emailer Plus. It’s an interesting little device originally sold in 2002 by Amstrad for circa £200, dropping to £15 only two years later in Tesco, and finally discontinued on July 14th 2011.  As you can see, it is quite a chunky but pretty device – as well as providing convenient access to email – so why did it fail?

Though the market for email on a household phone is probaby quite a small one – the Emailer Plus definitely has the ‘geek’ factor as well as being a little bit ‘retro.’  I bought one, not because it can give me access to emails, (I can do this well enough from my Samsung Galaxy S2 already,) but because it has got personalty.  The big blue display not only displays a nice clock in standby mode, but it also has the ability to play ZX Spectrum games, and other little tidbits that when integrated properly could make the big display quite useful.  The standard issue BT phone I have on my desk at work costs more than this, but offers much less in terms of functionality.

The failure in the Amstrad Emailer Plus is down to a naivety in understanding the direction that the internet and email was taking.  In the early days of modems and dial-up internet, it could cost 5p per minute to get online – webmail wasn’t taking off because staying online to write emails was costly – so it was better to have an offline client to do the writing.  The Amstrad Emailer required a ‘phone home’ call at least once a day – with a cost of 14p per call.  It’s a bit of a premium price to pay for receiving a bulk email delivery – plus, unless you were sensible enough to group your outgoing emails up into a single batch – the outgoing cost was also 14p per connection.

It’s a real shame, as I think had Amstrad had the foresight to see that the screen was valuable real-estate, the Emailer could have been a market-changing device.  It has the ability to host ‘widgets’ or ‘apps’ as they are now commonly known.  Amstrad have learnt it all now, with their ‘Amscreen’ – a backwards piece of technology consisting of essentially a flatscreen with a red LED ticket attached to the top in a bulky, ugly black case – being used to broadcast advertising.  The technology itself isn’t expensive or interesting – the real value is in where the screens are.  I recall a seminar at Warwick Business School a few years ago, with the General Manager of McDonalds in the UK.  When asked ‘What is McDonalds’ core business?’ most people responded with ‘selling burgers’ – when he replied that it wasn’t, the majority looked fairly confused.  His answer was ‘acquiring prime real-estate, to prevent our competitors selling burgers.’

In the same way, strategy needs to look at pushing alternatives to the core market of a project.  Sure, there may be a specific target market to aim the product at – but individual markets are a finite resource.  Look at alternative uses for your product – can it be abstracted and re-marketed at a different sector?  Do you have to sell it for it to benefit you?  The end result for the Amstrad Emailer was for Amstrad to use it as a loss-leader for selling their Emailer service.  It’s a shame that the device couldn’t be rescued from obscurity by diversifying.  Hopefully I’ll be able to make some use of it and deny this technological marvel it’s resting place on some gadgetry wasteland for a few more years to come.

I was driving down the M6 the other night, past junction 8 where the M5 splits off – and the Active Traffic Management was turned on.

At one point, we were all going along nicely at 40mph, as indicated by the overhead signs. All lanes were open, and there were no workmen about on the roads.

At the penultimate gantry before the M5 lane forked off the main carriageway, the overhead signs had been set to 20mph. With the majority of traffic moving along nicely, 11pm and no obstructions in the road, the driver of the lorry must have not seen the drop by 20mph. Unfortunately, the car driver in front of him had – and with the threat of the speed camera sign, had slowed his vehicle fairly abruptly.

This sent the HGV swerving into the middle lane, causing me to pull out into the fast lane – luckily fully aware that there was nothing coming up on the outside.

It’s exactly stupid and irresponsible uses of technology like this that make me wonder why Active Traffic Management was put there in the first place.

With the sad events that have occurred on the roads over the past few days, I can only hope that someone has the good sense to review this technology before it too contributes to the rising death tolls on our motorways.

Unity.

I have to be honest; when unity first appeared I though it looked like a very interesting idea – and since studying UI design at University (even doing a project on UI design in Gnome2) – there were lots of opportunities to be taken up by differentiating Ubuntu through it’s clean, friendly, UI-driven linux desktop environment.  However, Unity seems to be on a pathway to division.

A key paradigm across all my software development has been “developers are not the users” – and ‘clever’ design lies in simplicity, not complexity.  Users should be able to intuitively pick up and go without having to think about how the desktop works.  I personally believe this last bit to be especially true.  Many people are of the belief that using a computer and mouse is unnatural; that may well be so – but through consistency of action, and predictability of response – all systems can be easily learned.

The big issues that I have with Unity at the moment, are that simple things are no longer simple.  When left click used to mean ‘action something’, and right click brought up a menu – users were able to innovate and design and mess with their own desktop.  With the unity approach, even experienced computer users are having to open google to work out how to add an application to the sidebar.  I no longer know where to find things in the menu, and am finding myself having to rely on pressing a combination of keyboard buttons and mouse movements in order to do relatively simple things.  I can’t see an easy way of adding an application to the launcher, and there appears to be very few casual customisation options available to the end user.

Of course, the caveat to all this is that it’s still an unfinished product.  I see the non-LTS releases of Ubuntu as glorified BETAs – showing the developers and community the vision for what can be put into an LTS release.  I’m not sure where or how I’m going to cope with future upgrades, but for now a quick ‘aptitude install xbuntu-desktop’ has put me straight back into my comfort zone.  I hope that’s not the same story with too many other people.

I’ll keep this one short for brevity. It’s sweet and simple. If you’re anything like me you’re probably using at least 10 different operating systems at once. Well, that might be a slight over exaggeration, but I certainly use at least three in my home. Here’s the problem that I faced this evening and how I overcame it.

I have a linux server which is sharing some data using a samba share (SMB). Connecting to this from my windows box is simple, since microsoft is good enough to make mounting shares over SMB a piece of cake. My MacbookPro running OS X Lion, however, was a different story.

One option is to use the finder to manually connect to the share, but since I often connect to various computers using SSH I wanted to find a purely command-line solution. Thankfully, it’s super simple. Just use the UNIX command mount – as follows:

mount -t smbfs //<username>@<ip or fqdn>/<share name> <mount point>

The example of this on my network is as follows:

mount -t smbfs //james@192.168.0.4/james /Users/jamesanslow/linuxserverfiles

Note: you will require smbfs + samba installed + configured for this to work (duh?)

A firewall doesn’t always sit at the edge of your estate, sometimes a HIDS device belongs there instead.

A firewall can do lots of things, but can do a lot of things badly.

There is more than one way to skin a cat.

So I’ve been looking at some interesting reading, courtesy of Mez, and have come across the following:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/fire/chapter/ch04.html - Firewall Design.

This interests me muchly, as I currently use, and have always designed server-networks in the past as follows:

However, it seems that pretty soon that can have an adverse affect on the firewall; for each connection hitting the firewall from the net, there’s at least 6x the traffic passing through it. (  NET -> FW -> DMZ -> FW -> BACKEND -> FW -> DMZ -> FW -> NET )  This isn’t good, especially if you’re looking to purchase a firewall with a pretty low ‘max sessions limit.’  It gets worse if you’re thinking of splitting the ‘BACKEND’ into a number of different zones.  However, there is a nifty little improvement:

With this approach, you can move your ‘internet facing’ machines into their own DMZ zone, and still communicate with your backend services without passing too many times through the firewall.  It means that the number of connections the external firewall needs to handle is fewer, meaning you can get a more powerful machine, cheaper – and don’t have to compromise because of that pesky connection table limit.

Using this diagram now gives even more flexibility, as there is now a nice segregation between the networks behind the interior router.  This setup means that you can have a single-purpose network zone, which is neat, as PCI DSS states that all servers should have a single purpose.  If those have a single purpose, they should share a similar communications port setup – therefore it seems sensible to group them all into the same zone.  They’ll also probably not need much by the way of ‘interzonal’ communications – and if they do, it’s segregated off the external firewall.  It will also be much easier to spot problems introduced by an external event (DDoS, Digg Effect, Social Media Strategy Success), and those introduced by those pesky web developers (internal connections increasing).

Switching

This is where it starts to get complicated.  Where do you use switches here?  How do you segregate the switch.  Well, I guess I need to look into VLANs to segregate the switch.  Using the diagram above, the two Internal Networks could probably exist on the same switch, providing it was VLAN’d into separate blocks.  It’d be interesting to know if anyone has any preference here in terms of switch – or will a fairly basic switch do what you’d want it to do in this situation?

Conclusion / Call for Recommendations

With all this in mind, and the network infrastructure suddenly growing from what was essentially just a ‘firewall’ with loads of devices plugged into it to a much more complicated setup – how important is it that the technologies used in each of these individual networking devices are integrated?  There are a couple of vendors selling solutions that would integrate the entire networking stack, using the same technology in routers, switches and firewalls. Is it better to go with a single vendor to reduce the management headache, or will the benefits of an integrated solution only come about when many more devices are connected?

I look forward to hearing what others have done, and I look to sharing more of my decision making progress as things progress.

Ok, I’ve only been commuting this route for the past three months, though I have noticed a few key problems with the ‘Active Traffic Management’ system that probably require a more sophisticated form of complaint than a ‘blog rant’ – but who knows, it was worth trying it here first.

For those of you unaware of ‘Active Traffic Management,’ it consists of overhead gantries every x metres along the motorway, with a nice LED sign above each lane showing either the speed limit, a big red ‘X’ for Lane Closed, or an arrow, pointing either to the bottom left, or right, advising the motorist of which lane they should filter into.  There are also big information display board at special intervals (and before junctions) that advise motorists of issues ahead on the motorway network, and provide nice little diagrams for how to get off at any particular junction (as the junction dynamics change depending on the lane closure).  There are also average speed checks along the entire route, as well as nifty ‘traditional’ speed cameras every so often, to catch out the unsuspecting driver who strays above the limit imposed on the overhead sign.

Having my leg broken by a car, you think I’d have a bias towards slowing them down, but surprisingly, I don’t.

The problem for me lies in that there doesn’t appear to be a ‘level of assurance’ in the quality of the overhead sign.  A few months ago I was driving home at 2300 hours from Manchester, and pulled onto the M42.  The traffic was slowed to 50mph by the overhead signs (without a decrement from 70 to 60 to 50), and it was shown that lane closures would be ahead.  The traffic cones soon came into view, and I was shuffled down to the slow lane, with 50mph passing over my head every few metres.  Not long after I’d been driving, the speed limit reduced to 40, and I noticed a car come up behind me, clearly doing more than the 50 they should have been – and not looking like they’d be slowing to the 40 I was adhering to.  I then looked up, and the next sign was showing 20mph.  20MPH!!  I had to either slow down to this new sign, or face the fact the guy behind me was either going to career into me, or into the unsuspecting workmen that this very system was designed to protect.

Luckily for me, and them, they were able to slow down – but not without them rudely beeping their horn (which I know to be illegal past 2300 hours on a weekday).  The speed limit then increased back to 40mph, so I felt a little less bad – but then back down to 30mph.  They must have thought I was teasing them.  When I finally got to the end of the roadworks, I sped up to 70mph as fast as possible, and they joined me – pulling funny faces and signs out of their window, then speeding off at a speed considerably faster than me.

The problem I have here, is that there should be some legislation (or programming control) preventing the signs decrementing by more than 10mph between two signs.  I understand that in certain emergencies it is necessary to put the signs up immediately – but to have planned works without considering the effect of lowering the speed limit on the motorway to 20mph.. well it just seems ridiculous.

The second problem I had with them (that caused me to write this post in the first place), was on my way home the other night after work.  The motorway was then again brought down to one lane, using the aforementioned arrow system.  It correctly put us down to one lane, then as soon as the cones were signally us all to move over, the signs above changed to show all three lanes open and running at 50mph, despite us being limited to three lanes.  When the cones stopped, there was no difference between what had been shown on the gantries with the lanes closed.  It really annoys me that millions has been spent on this system, yet it is being used incorrectly through laziness.  This is not a technical issue – it is simply a lack of pride in doing a job well.  When thousands of hours of time must have been spent on the technical proposal and the theories into fluid dynamics and traffic movement – the implementers have appeared to ignore any use of controls to keep from adversely affecting traffic flow rather than increasing it.  I’d also love to see a few days a week with the ‘Active Traffic Management’ turned off completely, to confirm whether or not having it on has made a positive different or not.

So when David Cameron and the other ConDems are reading over their legislation on increasing the speed limit to 80mph, please can they spare a couple of hours to look over the crippling ‘Active Traffic Management’ that may – or may not – be improving Britain’s motorways.

Though I have recently purchased an Apple MacBook Pro, I am not yet ready to sign my entire technology stack off to them, and I’ve been really happy with my Android devices over the past 18 months. I’m loving the synchronisation between my gmail account and my phone, and it’s a really slick platform that I think is going to get better and better.

So all I need now is a Samsung Galaxy S2 case, and then I’m away.

I’m not sure anyone else would suggest going for the iPhone 4S – it just looks like too much – the tariff will be 33% more if I go for that, and with a 24 month contract, it’ll be out of date and crippled come the end of it.

Is there any new phone to be released that I’m missing?

I’m recording my eating and drinking habits here - with a nice graph of my daily weight.

I’m also recording my exercise in that spreadsheet, but also on Endomondo.

If there’s anyone out there with any tips/suggestions, I’d be glad to hear them; please comment below.