Randomized Updates

Backups: Bacula has been giving me problems the last week or so. I've got this file server I'm trying to back up; it's got a 2TB partition, and I've been naively trying to just grab it all in one go. Partly that's because it hasn't been backed up before, and I figured this'd be the quickest, simplest way to get going.

What's happened is that after slurping 2 TB over a 100 Mbit connection (no, there's no way to make that quicker), which takes 53 hours, the writing to tape fails for reasons I've yet to figure out. Bacula doesn't say "Oh, the first bit worked so I can just grab that next time...." (To be fair, that's probably a much harder problem than I imagine.) And in the meantime, despite having two drives and two pools of tapes, backups for other stuff pile up behind this big backup and then don't work: they get put on spool space, but then despooling to tape fails.

Contact manglement: I've been looking for a contact management program for $WORK. Requirements:

• database (not LDAP), so I can do funky joins and such
• web-based
• FIAF
• members can belong to more than one group
• extensible (ideally w/o my intervention) without making me feel like I've returned to maintaining the database frontend at my last job

This turns out to be surprisingly hard to find, and not just because Freshmeat's interface is terrible. Applications appear to fall into n categories:

• Incomplete and not updated since 2004
• Complete but full of bletcherous hacks like direct SQL manipulation of the table (making future modification hard), or assuming that a person belongs to one-and-only-one group; often intended for personal use, not business, as evidenced by space for a birthday and contact fields for 30 different IM platforms
• SugarCRM
• Replacements for Access/Filemaker

So now I'm trying to decide between using Dadabik, which'll let me make a frontend w/o much work as long as I can come up with a schema, or modifying one of the complete-but-bletcherous apps and getting a prettier page. (I'm always paranoid about people refusing to use a web-based tool because it isn't pretty enough; I don't know how to make it prettier and it's not something I personally care about enough to do something about, so I'm caught between don't care and don't know how to fix it if I do care. As a result I panic.)

Family: Son #2 went to the hospital Sunday night with his mom; he's fine, but I was up 'til they got back at midnight. Still got up at 5:30am as usual, thinking I'd catch up last night. Then Son #1 had a bad nightmare last night and it took a while to get him calmed down. Spent a couple hours after that staring at the ceiling, trying to get myself calmed down. Still up at 5:30am as usual.

Dentist: Root canal didn't work. My former dentist, who is the second most graceless dentist I've ever seen, couldn't get through and referred me to an endodontist (someone who does root canals; thank you, Wikipedia). My appointment for them is on April 1st.

And that is that.