June 11th, 2008

Software — No Comments
11
Jun 08

A few good apps #1

This is the first of (what I hope to be) a series of posts where I’ll link to some useful applications or other software and give a short description of why I think they might be worth a look. The majority will be Windows based, but I will mention if something is available for other platforms, and I’ll try and keep it to free (as in beer) software. If, however, there’s a particularly good application that (in my opinion) might be worth some of your hard earned cash, then I won’t hesitate to include it.

Allsnap (Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP/Vista, 64bit test version available)

This is a simple, lightweight piece of software which will make your windows snap together or to the edge of your monitor. It may not seem like a big deal at first, but it’s very useful if you like to have an organised desktop. If you’re running multiple monitors and like to keep a bunch of small windows open, then you’ll really wonder why this sort of functionality isn’t built into Windows after you’ve used it for a while.

Mozbackup (Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista)

A neat utility which takes the hassle out of backing up or restoring profiles for Firefox/Thunderbird (and more). It can also save time when deploying Firefox (or other supported software), on systems where you’d otherwise need to manually change proxy or security settings for example.

SyncToy (Windows XP/Vista)

One of Microsoft’s free PowerToy’s, it’s a backup/synchronisation tool that does it’s job well. It might not quite have the features to make it suitable for enterprise use, but for those who want an easy to set up and then quick to run (or automated with task scheduler) method to backup to an external hard drive, network attached storage or synchronise a laptop and pc then this is definitely worth trying.

Storage — No Comments
11
Jun 08

File server spring clean

I spent a few hours fixing a client’s busted machine tonight. About half way through booting Windows it would throw up a BSOD and reset itself, which (on a previously working machine) usually means bad ram or file system corruption. Of course, there was no backup of the four and a half years worth of documents, home movies and photos on the drive…

Memtest86+ showed no errors, so I threw in my Spinrite disk in hope it may save me from having to do a repair install of Windows. It found a bunch of bad blocks which it had to remap, and going by the SMART data, the drive looked to be on it’s last legs, but it managed to correct the problems, or at least enough to get it bootable again. At this point I decided to make an image of the drive before it completely failed, which I then copied up to my home file server.

While it was copying, I noticed a few of the drives on the server were getting a bit low on space. Not quite at critical levels, but low enough that I’d need to do something about it fairly soon. Normally I’d just use that as a reason to go buy another couple of drives to throw in it, but it’s at the stage where adding new, larger drives will require the removal of a couple of the older drives first. I’m actually currently in the process of piecing together and testing the hardware that will make up my new file server, which will address that problem (for the foreseeable future anyway), but that’s a few weeks away, so I thought I’d see if I could find a way to free up some space.

As you’d expect for most home servers, the majority of the total storage is taken up by media files, none of which I really want to get rid of, but I found I had a bunch of recorded HDTV programs that I’d just dumped in there in .ts format, which could be transcoded to h.264 or divx without significant quality loss.

Also taking up a fairly sizable chunk is my ’system build’ directory, which contains all the drivers, installers, patches and hotfixes I’ve downloaded over time. As I’d normally do a software rebuild on a system at least once a week, it’s a huge time saver having a local repository of that sort of stuff, especially given that I have limited bandwidth to the net.

The directory itself is fairly well organised, for example, if I need a driver for a nVidia video card, I know they’re stored in \drivers\nvidia\video\ or if I needed a patch for Quake 4 it’s in \games\quake4\patches\. Any time I download a new driver, installer or a new patch it gets added in with the rest, which is why it’s grown over time. I’m one of those people who find it hard to delete anything, but what I did start to wonder, is if it’s really necessary to have a triple redundant local backup of a dozen versions of the nVidia detonator drivers that were released back when I was running Windows 98SE, or all those patches for Windows XP that were later integrated into Service pack 1, 2 or 3.

That’s why I’m going to do a clean-up of that directory during the spare time I get over the next few days and move anything that seems unnecessary onto a spare external hard drive (just in case I do need it one day). I’ll probably only reclaim 20, maybe 25GB at most, but given that it’s on a RAID1 array which is also backed up externally it quickly adds up. It should also cut down the time needed for AV scanning, which will save wear and tear on the drives plus a bit of power.