mdlbear | 15 minutes in cyberspace

The purpose of today's computer clutter control is to get a start on my near-term goal of bringing some order and sanity to the crawling chaos that is the household file server. The non-geekish may want to skip this one.

The main motivations for this are the recent disk crash on the workstation, trantor (no lasting harm done, but there's nothing like a near miss to make you more cautious), and the fact that I've acquired a significant amount of offsite storage to use for backups.

In order to do offsite backups, I have to make a clear distinction between private stuff that has to be encrypted offsite, and the public and semi-public stuff most of which is on the web already and can simply be mirrored. Then there's the pile of stuff that's mirrored from elsewhere, including the Debian mirror, the collection of ripped CDs, and so on.

Right now these are all jumbled together, which leaves a few anomalies like saving monthly snapshots of things that will never change.

So here's the plan...

Basically, everything in /home -- all the users' home directories -- needs to be encrypted if it ever goes offsite. So it makes sense to put everything else that needs to be encrypted into /home as well. In particular, copies of /etc from all the various servers. These, and other sensitive configuration files like the firewall rules, go into /home/Config.

I'd been backing up the /etc's individually to my backup drive as part of the weekly manual backup, which meant that I had to run the script myself with ssh-agent running. Now, I still have to pull the /etc's manually, but the rest of the weekly backup can be done from a cron job.

The big partition on the file server is called /vv; it's something of a mess. The major subdirectories are mm (multimedia -- it also has my photo archive and all of the recording projects: concerts, tracks, and albums) and local (mounted as /usr/local, but it also contains /usr/local/starport, with all of the websites, configuration files, and what have you).

So here's where it's all going:

/vv/mm gets ripped CDs, downloaded .iso files, but not the photos and recording projects. It will be backed up locally, but not remotely, and won't have to have snapshots kept because it's all basically immutable.
/vv/srv gets the web server directories and other server-specific data. They'll all start out in .../Web, and eventually get moved out to host-specific directories as part of the transition from CVS to git for version control.
/vv/users gets user-specific files. In particular, it gets my photos and recording directories. The starport pseudo-user gets most of the rest of what's currently in .../starport. The more sensitive parts will end up in /home/starport.
/vv/mirrors will get the Debian mirror, and won't have to be backed up at all. Eventually there may be other mirrors here.

The main accomplishment for yesterday was writing the scripts to back up the configuration files in /etc on all the servers, and putting them in /home/Config.

The main accomplishment for today was setting up /vv/users and figuring out what goes there, and figuring out how to split up the current /vv/local/starport. Not much else, but at least now I know where things belong.