my life experience and information that may help others find what they need

Here is a copy of the email we sent out as an announcement to all friends and family members.

Read First, open the Attachment second No peeking! We mean it!

We recently received news that is going to not only change our lives but
likely everyone who is included in this email. Due to it we have had to
cancel future plans we had on weekends and even a wedding in December.

It’s hard to understand what news could be so good, err great, that we can
be excited about even if it means having to miss a wedding in December.
To find out you will just have to look at the attachment (yes, we give you
permission, go ahead and look…wait! Just kidding, go ahead and look).

After opening the attachment, please scroll down below and read the rest.

With this wonderful news, we want to give everyone the opportunity to
receive announcements from us during this time. We also want to be able
to give everyone the control of whether or not they receive announcements
from us, so please, if you want to receive them sign up at
http://www.wilkin-family.net/announcements/signup.html

Likewise, you can unsubscribe at your convenience too. Bonus points go to
the first person to figure out why we selected the From Address we did for
the announcement emails (you’ll understand when you get your subscription
confirmation email from us).

Feel free to forward this email to any friends, family members, etc. so
that they too may receive the great news and be given the option to
subscribe to our announcements.

Thanks all,
Kami, Matt, Spunky, and Baby Wilkin

Baby Announcement

For those wanting to support a local printer connected to their Linux system via RDP (Remote Desktop) connecting to a Windows server, here is a quick how-to.

1. First look up the Printer Name on your Linux box, it is best if it is a single word and under 20 characters. You can typically find this by opening a document, selecting Print and it should be the name in the drop down.
2. Next you will have a script that call rdesktop like so:
   rdesktop -r printer:<YOUR PRINTER NAME ON LINUX>="WINDOWS DRIVER NAME AS IT APPEARS IN ADD PRINTER" <YOUR SERVER IP ADDRESS>
3. Run the rdesktop script and login
4. Go to Printers and Faxes
5. Right-click on the Printer that matches your Linux printer’s name and choose Properties
6. Print a test page!

I wanted to use rdiff-backup with my LinkStation Pro Duo as it makes incremental backups and the retrieving of backups just dead easy. Unfortunately, its a pain in the *** to install rdiff-backup on the LinkStation Pro Duo. So I wrote a work-around.

Note: This only works if you are using a public/private key for authentication via SSH and on a user by user basis. To do this read my post titled, LinkStation Pro Duo, enabling SSH.

To get this to work from a Client machine that runs Linux, you need to install “sshfs”. In short, this allows you to mount a drive/share on your LinkStation Pro Duo onto your client machine. This in turn gives you the opportunity to run rdiff-backup locally which DOES NOT require rdiff-backup –server to be installed on the LinkStation.

Once you have sshfs installed, you will need to create a startup script for your username. Now this will vary depending on the distribution you use, but if you use Ubuntu or one of its derivatives, you can do the following:

1. Setup Directory for Mount Detection
   We need a directory setup on the NAS so that we can tell if the share has already been mounted. This is needed because every time you login via SSH, it will try to mount this drive, and if you are like me and you run your PC 24/7, this could be a problem.
   1. Remote into your NAS via SSH, using ssh <username>@<nas_ip_address>
   2. Create a directory on your NAS that you will put in as the CHECK_FOLDER value in the below script by running
      mkdir <path_to_your_new_folder>
2. Create a .bash_login script
   1. Open your favorite editor (gui, graphical user interface or cli, command line is fine), name it “.bash_login”
   2. Copy the following into the file:
      #!/bin/bash

      CHECK_FOLDER=/mnt/nas-backup/
REMOTE_FOLDER=<username>@<nas_ip_address>:/mnt/array1/Backup
LOCAL_FOLDER=/mnt/nas-backup

      # Check if the NAS Backup Share has been Mounted, if it hasn't mount it
if [ ! -d $CHECK_FOLDER ]; then
sshfs $REMOTE_FOLDER $LOCAL_FOLDER
fi

   3. Replace the values of CHECK_FOLDER, REMOTE_FOLDER, and LOCAL_FOLDER so it suites your setup.
   4. Save the file
3. Logout and log back in
   Your NAS share should be mounted automatically so long as you have a public/private key authentication setup.
4. Setting up your rdiff-backup
   For rdiff-backup, I simply run
   rdiff-backup --exclude-special-files <path_to_directory_to_backup> <mount_location_of_nas_share>
   
   To automate it, I put it as a cronjob that runs every night.

Note on 12/08/2008: I have now started to use rsync as it does not require me to mount the NAS Shares onto my personal computer. It also supports public/private keys allowing me to run it via cronjob daily.

That’s it!