My Backup Solution

Last night I put the finishing touches on my little backup system for my home network and it all works!

About 2 months ago I grew annoyed with the fact that I had no real backup system in place for my gear, I decided that something needed to be done. I did a quick search for backup schedulers and didn't find anything out there that tickled my fancy, so I thought "What the heck, I'll build my own."

It consists of a daemon on a server computer (which I wrote in C) and a little Python script on each computer in my network (written for me by my good friend Steve as I lack Python skillz).

The daemon comes up when the server boots and sends a broadcast packet to let everyone know it is awake and ready to receive files, each host then sends the server a request to join the backup queue. The server works through the queue, starting what I call the backup transaction with each host in the queue in turn; first it sends the host a "backup now!" packet, the host sends the compressed backup files then tells the server when it's done. The daemon then moves on to the next client in the list. Basic stuff really. But it took me ages to get right...

The daemon should compile on a Linux box (well, I hope so, it compiled on mine...). The log directory needs to be set to somewhere that is writeable by the user you run the executable with obviously.

I'm not going to be so arrogant as to say that my code is perfect, it isn't. I'm putting it up here to show everybody and to learn from your comments. Don't insult me too much please :P

Here goes:
BUddyd.c: http://pastie.org/310236
BUddy.py: http://pastie.org/310981

The "auto client" I talk about is an edited version of the BUddy.py script that listens for the broadcast packet and then joins the queue. I'm just sticking with the manual way for now.

Google to release Android source code

Looks like Google has released the source code for their "new" Android mobile platform: http://source.android.com/download. Looks interesting, but I don't think I'll bother to be honest... I have a lot to be getting on with already apart from writing apps for a platform where Google has the right to kill your app at any time and on any phone they please: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/16/android_kill_switch/.

Favourite quote from the download page: "To build the Android source under Linux, you will need Ubuntu." Need? Ubuntu?

:D