Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Finally, with regard to being a system administrator, the following are
some general rules of thumb I have found that hold true in our experience.
■
Never do something you can't undo.
■
Always check the backups. Never assume they are working and make
sure you can restore from them.
■
Write down what you did, even if you know you will never forget it,
you will. In our experience, DokuWiki [3] is an excellent documentation
tool.
■
If you do something more than once, write a script to do it.
■
Get to know your users before there is a problem. Then, when there is,
they will know who you are and maybe have a little understanding.
■
Remember you are performing a service for your users, you don't own
the system, you just get to play with it.
■
Check your backups.
■
Before running rm -rf *, always check your current directory; especially
if you are logged in as a superuser.
■
Never stop learning; there is always something you should know to
make your job easier and your system more stable and secure.
■
Check your backups, again.
10.5 Backups
Given our commercial projects as well as our internal development
projects, there is an absolute requirement to ensure that all necessary
data are secured against the possibility of data loss. We settled on tapes
as the medium for this, and our chosen backup strategy is to run a full
backup of all data over the weekend and incremental backups Monday
to Thursday. This covers all OGT's current projects; once a project is
completed it is archived to a separate tape volume and retained, but not
included further in the weekly backups as it is no longer changing.
Initially, our pre-confi gured IT system was delivered with a commercial
product installed, this was NetVault from BakBone [4]. As this was
already installed and confi gured on the system, worked well and was easy
to use, there was no need to change to an alternative. However, as the
amount of our IT hardware expanded so did the licence requirements for
running NetVault. As a result, we considered open source alternatives.
The main candidates were Bacula [5] and Amanda [6] (the Advanced
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