It Lives!

Derzon is now up and running and my stuff should be accessible 24/7 now, rather than bouncing up and down as my gaming needs dictate. Passwords should be the same as before, and FTP is accessible now until I figure out how to get FTP-over-SSH working.

The universe seems to have been conspiring against me to try and keep me from getting it back up. My hub appears to be dead, which forced me to trek halfway across the city just to get a crossover cable; one of my KVM cables was missing; the older CD-ROM drive I have didn’t want to read CD-RW discs…

But those were nothing compared to just trying to copy the data across.

The simplest way is to get a network share set up and just do a recursive copy across that share, of course. However, NFS is a pain to set up, so I figured I’d just throw up a Samba server in the meantime. Setting it up was trivial and within a few minutes I had the shares mounted and was copying data across.

After a few test directories though, some problems started popping up. Symbolic links weren’t being copied properly. Files with names differing only in case weren’t showing up; if I had Kobold.gif and kobold.gif in the same directory, only one of them got copied. File permissions and ownership weren’t being preserved. These were due to limitations in the SMB format since it’s a protocol that originated on Windows, after all.

Okay, fine, I decided to use ‘tar’ as an intermediate step since it would preserve things properly. I’d just run tar on the local files, redirect the output across the share, and then untar it on the other system. That worked just fine…until the size of the tar file hit 2 gigs and the network share coughed up an error message. Linux supports files over 2 gigs just fine, but Samba apparently has a bit of trouble.

Okay, I figured I’d just create the tar files locally, FTP them across, and then unpack them. Well apparently FTP has a problem with the 2 gig point too… There are ways to split the files into smaller chunks, but that would have required a lot of manual intervention and I wanted something more or less automatic.

I remembered that a long time ago at work I’d used ‘rsh’ to send tar data across the network, but I didn’t have it set up. I did have ssh though — could it do the same thing? It could indeed. In the end it wound up being as simple as

tar cf - . | ssh derzon "(cd /media/ ; tar xf -)"

However, it was a little on the s l o w side. I was getting 5-6MB/s with the other methods, but through ssh it was trudging along at about 400kB/s. It was late already though, so I just let it run overnight.

Now I just have to verify there were no copy errors somehow…