shad's blog

FreeBSD on the ASUS Eee Box using an USB flash drive

I wanted my personal server to be closer to me. So I invested few days ago in the Asus Eee Box, thinking it is the best configuration for a light server at home.

I moved this blog and all my services from my dedicated server to my new one.

To setup FreeBSD on this kind of machine, you have two ways to do it:

Install FreeBSD using a pxeboot image and a dhcp server.
Install FreeBSD using a bootable USB flash drive.

Creating a bootable USB flash drive by using the original ISO image is a bit annoying if you haven't got a FreeBSD station yet. I have been using the fbsd2img.sh script,

I share my USB flash drive image: 7.1-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.img.
To setup the USB flash drive, use "dd" (/dev/XXX is the device of your USB flash drive):

dd if=7.1-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.img of=/dev/XXX bs=1m

Here is the result of the server hosting this blog :)

24 · 01

Duplicity: simple, efficient and secure backup solution for Unix

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Backuping data is a real problem. Investing 2 RAID 1 harddrives is a little expensive for a workstation. Duplicity is able to do incremental backups with the rsync algorithm. All backuped data are encrypted with gpg. All duplicity options are available on the official website. I wrote a small script for automate backup on my workstation. backup.sh:

#!/bin/sh
ROOT="/root/backup"
DISTANT="ssh://user@zaphod.eu//home/user"
PASSPHRASE="xxxxxxxxxxxx"
KEEP_ARCHIVE="2M" # 2 Months
FILELIST="files.lst"
export PASSPHRASE
duplicity       --include-globbing-filelist "${ROOT}/${FILELIST}" \
--exclude '**' \
--full-if-older-than "${KEEP_ARCHIVE}" / "${DISTANT}"
duplicity remove-older-than ${KEEP_ARCHIVE} ${DISTANT}
Then a small file list specifies what has to be backuped or not.

files.lst:

- /home/shad/p0rn
- /home/shad/tmp
+ /etc
+ /home/shad
According to duplicity documentation, a line beginning with a '+' specify a directory or a file to include and '-' for exclude. Be aware of list order.

It remains to add a cron entry for a weekly schedule:

0 0 * * 1 backup.sh | mail -s "Backup Report" root@zaphod.eu

Now your worksation is secured, you can restore any files to any date within the backup delay.

default duplicity system unix

FreeBSD on the ASUS Eee Box using an USB flash drive

Duplicity: simple, efficient and secure backup solution for Unix

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