Entries posted in January 2016

A while back I wrote about some issues with converting a two-disk RAID system to a one-disk system, but just to recap:

• We knew were were moving to Finland.
• The shared/main computer we used in the UK was old and slow.
• A new computer in Finland would be more expensive than it should be.
• Equally transporting a big computer from the UK would also be silly.

In the end we bought a small form-factor PC, with only a single drive and I moved one of the two drives from the old machine into it. Then converted it to run happily with only a single drive, and not email every day to say "device missing".

So there things stood, we had a desktop with a single drive, and I ensured that I took full daily backup via attic.

Over Chrismas the two-year old drive failed. To the extent I couldn't even get it to be recognized by the BIOS, and thus couldn't pull data off it. Time to test my backups in anger! I bought a new drive, installed a minimal installation of the Jessie release of Debian onto the system, and then ran:

 cd /
 .. restore latest backup ..

Two days later I'd pulled 1.3Tb over the network, and once I fixed up grub, /etc/fstab, and a couple of niggles it all just worked. Rebooted to make sure the temporary.home hostname, etc, was all gone and life was good.

Restored backup! No errors! No data-loss! Perfect!

The backup-script I use every day was very very good at making sure nothing was missed:

attic create --stats --checkpoint-interval=7200 attic@${remote}:/attic/storage::${host}-$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H)
  --exclude=/proc      \
  --exclude=/sys       \
  --exclude=/run       \
  --exclude=/dev       \
  --exclude=/tmp       \
  --exclude=/var/tmp   \
  --exclude=/var/log   \
  /

In other news I published my module for controlling the new smart lights I've bought

• CPAN Device::Osram::Lightify.
• Source on github.

Tags: backups, finland, lighting, osram lightify | No comments

A couple of years ago I was dissatisfied with mutt, mostly because the mutt-sidebar patch was dropped from the Debian package. That lead to me thinking "How hard can it be to write a modal, console-based mail-client?"

It turns out writing a client is pretty simple if you limit yourself solely to Maildirs, and as I typically read my mail over SSH on the mailhost itself that suited me pretty well.

Recently I restarted the mail-client. Putting it together from scratch to simplify the implementation, and unify a lot of the adhoc scripting which is provided by Lua. People seem to like the client, but the single largest complaint was "Can't use it - no IMAP."

This week I've mostly been adding IMAP support, and today I'll commit the last few bits that mean it is roughly-functional:

• Connecting to a mail-server works.
• Getting the folders works.
• Getting the messages works.

The outstanding niggles will be relating to getting/setting the new/read/seen/unseen flags, and similar. But I'm pleased that the job wasn't insurmountable.

I've used libcurl to provide the IMAP functionality because most of the IMAP libraries I looked at were big, scary, and complex. Using curl to access IMAP is pretty neat, simple, and straightforward. The downside is you're making a lot of "http" requests. So I might need to revisit things.

Happily my imap wrapper doesn't need much functionality. So if I can find a better library swapping it out will be simple.

In conclusion: Lumail almost has IMAP support, and that might mean it'll be more useful to others.

Tags: imap, lumail, lumail2 | No comments

So after living here in Finland for 6 months I've now bought a flat.

We have a few days to sort out mortgage paperwork, and assuming there are no problems we'll be moving into the new place on/around the 1st of March.

Finally I'll be living in Finland, with a sauna of my very own.

Interesting times.

In more developer-friendly news I made a new release of Lumail with the integrated support for IMAP. Let us hope people like it.

Tags: helsinki, life, lumail | 4 comments